UBC's bookstore has three unusual new workers this month.
Grey, Kelly, and Robson are a trio of robots, Kiwibots to be exact (a brand from California).
The minifridge-sized rolling cubes are on hand as part of a pilot project between the university and Rogers Communications. Using 5G and AI, the three bots are offering students answers to questions (related to the bookstore) and treats for the next four weeks.
"With screen 'faces' featuring eyes, they’re like prodigy plug-in puppies," reads a press release from UBC.
"If you want to ask one a question, you can simply push a button on the robot’s lid and speak to it," reads the release.
While other robots are helping out in the food service industry in Vancouver, the retail bots are part of a first-of-its-kind technology pilot project on a Canadian university campus.
Kiwiboats are used around the world already; the goal of the pilot project has more to do with the humans.
"The goal is to study how students interact with the robots, and build a dataset on human-robot interaction, emotion recognition and real-time AI learning for possible future and industry collaborations," says Raymond Chau, the program manager of the Rogers UBC Collaborative Research and Innovation Partnership.
