Meet SPENCER: The Robot to Assist You With All Your Airport Needs

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As airports around the world have been feeling the financial squeeze, always looking to lower costs while maintaining service standards, managers have been turning their eyes to the emergent field of robotics and computerised knowledge bases. As trends in other industries show, automation and centralisation are key components of cost reduction.

Several airports have turned to more traditional routes, by operating remotely-staffed helpdesks, and London’s Luton is notably turning to holographic technology, Amsterdam’s Schipol is getting the full treatment – a never-tiring and always eager to help robotic assistant named SPENCER (or socially situation-aware perception and action for cognitive robots).

SPENCER is the product of three-years’ development conducted at six universities with over $4.5 million in funding, the Schipol application will be the first public demonstration and test of the technology.

You can simply approach SPENCER, ask it for directions to a gate, and follow the robotic assistant to your destination. To the user, the experience should not be functionally different from asking a flesh and blood person the same question. Behind the scenes, the story is different.

In a marked advancement over the current commercially available state-of-the-art robots, SPENCER is capable of counting and keeping track of the members of the inquiring party, waiting when needed for the slowest members to catch up, and keeping track of other passengers and moving objects, avoiding collisions, and staying out of traffic.

At its current stage, SPENCER is incapable of using moving walkways, trams, or conveniently passing security checkpoint, but the team behind it is working on solutions to keep track of passengers on walkways and through other areas that SPENCER can’t access.