By: Nick Gambino
From the looks of it, LG wants to be known as the home of the practical robot. They’ve just announced the addition of 3 new robots to their CLOi line.
Just last year at CES they unveiled the Airport Cleaning Robot and the Airport Guide Robot. One of them cleans up airports and the other assists travelers with info on where they’re trying to get to. Can you guess which one does what?
While LG hasn’t offered up a ton of details on the electronic pals joining the pack, we do know what each is supposed to be able to do.
The Serving Robot will find its place in airport lounges and hotels. It will serve drinks and food on a sliding tray. Some are speculating that it can deliver other items that a hotel might carry due to the appearance of a towel in its compartment in the released photo. Though that might just be a napkin as LG only mentioned food and drinks.
The Porter Robot, as can be delineated from its name, is a porter of sorts. It can carry your suitcase as well as help with express check-ins and check-outs at hotels.
Then there’s the Shopping Cart Robot which surprisingly is the only one not designed for an airport or hotel. Look at LG, breaking out of their comfort zone.
The Shopping Cart Robot will find its main use in supermarkets where it will act as a smart shopping cart of sorts. Not only will it carry your groceries for you as you shop but it will also keep a running tally of all the products in the cart.
It even has a built-in barcode scanner to check the price on any item. Going a step further, you can choose your items through an app before you get to the store and when you arrive, the little guy will lead you to your requested items.
As you can probably tell, this last one excites me the most. It’s just more of an everyday convenience so will have more of an impact in my life.
For now, these are merely concept robots. So don’t expect to see them on the market any time soon. They apparently still need time to test them out in real world environments in order to iron out any kinks.
That, combined with the photos, is pretty much all we know so far. But we plan to get an up-close look at LG’s CLOi robots at CES next week.
Stay tuned for more!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Gambino is a regular script writer and tech beat reporter for NewsWatch. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.
