Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

The rise of a robotic dawn in services industry

Food delivery, hotel room service, and delivery of hotel amenities like towels and toiletries are currently undertaken by robots in a handful of establishments.

Techi, the service robot, can collect food from the chef and deliver food to patrons in a restaurant. Robots are being deployed in service industries because manpower-intensive industries such as food and beverage (F&B) and hospitality are finding it hard to employ enough Singaporeans to take on the jobs. Photo: Techmetics

Techi, the service robot, can collect food from the chef and deliver food to patrons in a restaurant. Robots are being deployed in service industries because manpower-intensive industries such as food and beverage (F&B) and hospitality are finding it hard to employ enough Singaporeans to take on the jobs. Photo: Techmetics

Follow TODAY on WhatsApp

SINGAPORE — Food delivery, hotel room service, and delivery of hotel amenities like towels and toiletries are currently undertaken by robots in a handful of establishments. But this year, be prepared to see them deployed in the services industry in a bigger way as companies turn to innovation and automation to boost their productivity in the new manpower-lean economy.

Since August last year, W Cafe at the Devan Nair Institute for Employment and Employability in Jurong has been using a robot waiter to make food and drink deliveries at least five times a day to selected customers on different floors.

The cafe staff load food and drink orders into compartments in the robot, after which it makes its way to the lift lobby. The robot has been enabled to communicate with the lift, which will stop at the correct floors. Once the lift door opens, the robot wheels itself to the customers’ doorstep, where they just need to key in a code provided by the cafe to unlock the right compartment with their orders.

“We have no manpower to deliver, and it is difficult to hire people. So this robot is a big help; it is also easy to operate,” said cafe employee Cecilia Chung. She added that they are expanding the number of customers the robot can deliver to in the coming year.

After becoming ubiquitous in the manufacturing industry, robots’ foray into the services industries is the rise of a new dawn, two robotics services companies told TODAY. The reason is obvious — manpower-intensive industries such as food and beverage (F&B) and hospitality are finding it hard to employ enough Singaporeans to take on the jobs.

Since last July, two robots have been deployed by Hotel Park Avenue Rochester to transport hotel room supplies in between the floors. Just before Christmas, it deployed a third robot to deliver room service orders from its in-house restaurant to guests. Like W Cafe’s robot, these robots are able to use the lifts, and the room service bot is even able to call room guests when it arrives.

“One of the main challenges faced by our housekeeping staff was the frequent trips they had to make to replenish room items or remove used items. In addition, these trolley movements up and down floors had caused a bottleneck in the back-end operations room and cargo lifts, especially during peak hours, often resulting in slower turnaround of rooms and lower productivity,” said a spokesman for United Engineers, which owns the hotel.

Productivity gains from the use of robots are nothing to sniff at, report the companies that use them. Sats, which does ground-handling and in-flight catering services for Changi Airport, uses robots to assemble its airline meal trays. Doing so has allowed it to cut its tray-assembly production lines from five staff per line to three.

Mr Goh Siang Han, Sats’ senior vice-president of inflight catering, added: “The use of robotics in the area of tray assembly eliminates the need for manual labour and allows our employees the opportunity to acquire competencies required to enlarge their job functions.”

For Hotel Park Avenue Rochester, the three robots have been able to perform the work of 3.5 full-time employers daily, a boon for an industry plagued by chronic manpower shortage in areas such as housekeeping, front office, kitchen, F&B and other support functions, United Engineers’ spokesman said.

And the cost of leasing these robots is comparable to hiring a human being. For example, robotics providers said leasing a delivery or room service bot will cost below S$2,000 a month, and that includes maintenance and service fees. In comparison, the monthly salary of a full-time waiter ranges between S$1,200 and S$1,600.

Companies can also get grants of up to 70 per cent of qualifying project costs under Spring Singapore's Capability Development Grant as the Government is encouraging small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to use robotics to boost productivity. In last year’s Budget, the Government set aside more than S$450 million to support this programme over the next three years.

The Economic Development Board and Spring Singapore said there are bright times ahead for the use of robotics.

“Given the global growth potential of new-generation collaborative and service robots, with the right strategy, we see opportunities to nurture robotics into potentially a billion-dollar industry in the next five to 10 years.

“Over the past year, we have observed more SMEs, particularly in industries such as food, retail, precision engineering and logistics, adopting robotics and automation in their daily operations,” the two agencies said in a joint statement in response to queries.

So it is no surprise that more service companies are cottoning on to the potential benefits of such robots, going by the number of enquiries made and deals signed with robotics services companies.

Six hotel entities, including at least one hotel chain, are in talks with Aitech Robotics and Automation to lease the housekeeping and room service robots. A F&B group that owns 200 restaurants also just inked an agreement with Aitech to lease service bots. Aitech is working on upgraded models of these robots, which are expected to be able to not just deliver food but also accept credit card payments. Another provider, Techmetics Solutions, is rolling out its bots in hotels, restaurants and hospitals.

Beyond making deliveries within the confines of an industrial building, hotel or restaurant, some companies are looking more ambitiously at making robots traverse across the island. One local company following the lead of Amazon in the United States in using drones to make deliveries is foodpanda, which has started food delivery trials with drones.

“We have already gone through some development phases and we are now testing. We are working on this as a main project for the New Year and are happy to see we have already done significant progress,”said Ms Aspa Lekka, foodpanda Singapore’s managing director.

Aitech is also working on providing robots for food delivery services in industrial areas. It is in talks with a major industrial estate developer here to develop a robot prototype. Mr Benjamin Ng, Aitech’s deputy marketing director, said: “It is always a problem for those working in such places to get food and drinks, and some who are working machinery are not even able to leave their work areas, so this is a good solution for the industrial area.”

While the increased deployment of robots means a loss of jobs for humans, analysts said that so far these are in sectors traditionally shunned by Singaporeans. Mr Ng said: “The F&B industry is running out of people who want to be waiters and do things like taking orders and bill payments, so our robots can take care of the mundane work tasks.”

Added Techmetics’ CEO Mathan Muthupillai: “Because of recent policies, there’s insufficient manpower. Singaporeans are also not willing to go for F&B jobs, and we are moving towards more quality jobs.”

However, analysts also said despite these recent developments, adoption rate for robots is still generally expected to be slower in the services industries compared to the manufacturing sector. One crucial factor is robotic technology is nowhere close to being mature yet for this sector.

“For customer-facing industries, there are a lot more varied environment and scenarios, so we need a lot more intelligence. There’s still a big gap — the demand is there, but robotic technology is still not up to scratch,” explained Dr Ang Wei Tech, associate professor at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University.

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.