Many people consider air travel to be tiresome and time consuming due to the long queues, heavy luggage and numerous security measures. Thus, airline industry experts always try to invent new technology to make the travel as smooth as possible. At the Future Travel Experience Asia Expo 2016, organised in Singapore on November’16, the communications and IT service provider SITA has revealed some of their latest inventions including the completely autonomous SITA Baggage Robot or ‘Leo’. The robot is self-propelled vehicle, which can be used as the next generation airport baggage service. At present, the robot is being trialled at several places across Asia.
The prototype robot has the capacity to carry two heavy suitcases in the two separate compartments. There is also a touch screen, which will allow the passengers to manage the baggage drop after scanning the boarding pass.
Leo has been developed by a robotics company situated near Lausanen in Switzerland.
It has been found that robot ‘Leo’ can navigate smoothly inside the airport and it is capable of detecting any obstruction in the path, which helps Leo to avoid any collision or accident.
According to SITA President APAC, Ilya Gutlin, maybe it’ll make people think about whether they can take a fairly common process that’s been done millions of times and put it on its head. Gutlin has also informed that after the invention of the robot, instead of people going to the bag drop, the baggage belt will come to them.
During the month of May, Robot Leo has already been trialled in Geneva and at present it’s giving trial during its Asia tour.
At the Future Travel Experience Asia Expo 2016, the robot officially made his debut and it will head towards the HKIA Technovation Conference and Exhibition in Hong Kong.
Gutlin has informed, “People were actually curious to see what Leo does, which was wonderful. They would entrust him with the bags, they could just walk away without seeing where Leo was going. We feel that something like Leo is a nice friendly way for passengers to get to that idea that they’re basically putting bags on the belt without another person. It’s a way to get people more familiar with the experience.”
Robot Leo will be able to make the travel experience more personal because of the self-service operation. Apart from Leo, SITA is also developing several other technologies for the air travel industry.
