Las Vegas/Berlin – 27 December 2016
“Botlr” and “Pepper” are important employees: Quick in service, little maintenance and always open to work overtime. The first service-robots have long been implemented in hotels (Aloft) and on cruise liners (Aida). The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at the beginning of January will show the latest trends and opportunities in robot-support.
A robot, which prepares and serves coffee? One, which is able to take over devices control in hotels? And one simply for communication? This is what the Swiss Smart Home company is planning to present at the CES at the beginning of January. The smart and humanoid robot “Pepper”, with a size of only 1.20 m, will independently move around the CES in a perfectly natural way. He will amaze the visitors with his pretty appearance and his surprising abilities. After a warm welcome and a nice small-talk, Pepper shows that he is not only a small, pretty robot: He is an intelligent, mobile assistant with many more skills than just being able to manage all networked devices in the “connected home” environment. He also interacts with the residents in a natural way and conducts daily tasks, like the preparation of tea and coffee.
Those service operations can be easily integrated in hotel suites for example, which are equipped with digitally networked devices and systems. Robots already manage luggage transport in hotels (Yotel) or act as rolling order transports (Aloft); in Japan, androids already carry out check-ins.
Survey: in 2019, there will be 31 million robots supporting private households worldwide
Between 2016 and 2019 the number of housework-robots will rise up to 31 million unites worldwide. The sales value of robots, which vacuum, cut grass or clean the pool will increase up to 13 billion US-dollars within that period of time. This is the forecast of „The International Federation of Robotics (IFR)“, published in the world-robot-report 2016 „Service robots“.
According to Joe Gemma, president of the International Federation of Robotics, “the robotics in personal and home environments have experienced a strong, global growth. However, there are still only a few mass-market products, like floor cleaning robots, grass cutting robots and toy robots. But next generation robots will become more effective and will conquer new fields of application. ”
Within the next years, the largest part of the market will still be occupied with those robots, which are supporting in housekeeping, like vacuum cleaners and floor cleaners in general. Sales numbers will increase from most recently 3.6 million units (2015) to overall around 30 million units within the forecast period from 2016 to 2019. The market share of vacuum and floor cleaners is 96 per cent of the number of units sold in the household robot segment. Automatic robotic lawnmower and pool-cleaners follow on ranks two and three.
Sales Figures in the Entertainment sector are also quite dynamic. Toy robots, remote control multimedia robots or education and science robots for private users amounted to 1.7 million units sold in 2015. According to the IFR forecast, this market will rise to a total of 11 million units within the next three years. Market shares of toy and hobby-robots stand at roughly 70 per cent in the Entertainment sector.
Service-Robots, supporting old and handicapped people, recently recorded a strong growth. The number of units sold is still relatively low with around 4,700 in 2015, but sales figures should increase to a total of 37,500 units from 2016 to 2019. The sales value of this development will be reflected as follows: in 2015 sales units rose to 16.8 million US-dollars – this represents an increase of 34 per cent on the previous year. Within the forecast period from 2016 to 2019, the overall value is supposed to rise to a total of 97 million US-dollars.