Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Service Automation in Travel, Tourism and Hospitality by Ivanov Stanislav; Webster Craig;

Author:Ivanov, Stanislav; Webster, Craig;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2019-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Service Automation in Travel,

Tourism and Hospitality, 123–133

Copyright © 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

doi:10.1108/978-1-78756-687-320191007

Chapter 8

Greggg: A Scalable High-performance, Low-cost Hospitality Robot

Sam R. Thangiah, Michael Karavias, Ryan Caldwell, Matthew Wherry, Jessica Seibert, Abdullah Wahbeh, Zachariah Miller and Alexander Gessinger

Introduction

The task of determining what type of a robot to use in the hospitality industry requires consideration of two factors: what is the robot’s required hospitality task and what are the costs and types of robots available commercially that would fit the hospitality task? As few commercially available robots fit precisely with the desired hospitality task, if no commercially available robot fits the task, the available commercial robots would require expensive customization leaving the user extremely dependent on the company manufacturing the robot for both parts and expansion. A recent example was when a decade-old autonomous robot in the artificial intelligence and robotics laboratory needed a new motherboard, and the company manufacturing the robot wanted US $1,600 to replace the old motherboard available from the robot manufacturer. A different vendor had the same motherboard for US $300. Commercial robots are exorbitantly priced and do not allow for scalability and innovative expansions. This expense and scalability was the impetus for building and programing Greggg, using easily obtained hardware and software without paying exorbitant prices each time a change was required to the robot’s hardware or software.

This research is on the hardware and software design and implementation of an expandable, scalable, high-performance, low-cost robot for diverse hospitality tasks. Low cost, in this chapter, is associated with a robot that costs US $2,000 or less. Greggg was implemented using off-the-shelf hardware. Its vision processing uses Deep Learning algorithms and its navigation strategies draw on intelligent heuristics. Currently, Greggg can give tours to prospective students on campus and navigate inside buildings. In addition, it is being programed to act as a docent for a local museum. This chapter explains Greggg’s hardware and software architecture.

Next section “Literature Review” discusses the use of robots for hospitality tasks. Section “Hardware Architecture of Greggg” provides hardware details of the robot. Section “Hardware and Software Integration” describe the interface between the hardware and software and software architecture of Greggg, respectively. Section “Tasks Performed by Greggg” lists the capabilities of Greggg for use in varied hospitality tasks. Section “Future Work” lists the future work to be done with Greggg and the last section is the conclusion.

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