Curious visitor
What is a service robot, and what do they do?
A service robot carries things and guides people in places like restaurants and hotels. It brings food to a table, takes dirty dishes back, delivers a bill, or leads a guest to a seat. It follows a map of the building, avoids people and furniture, and returns to a charging point when its battery runs low.
The short version
You have probably seen one. A wheeled machine about the height of a trolley, with trays, moving between the kitchen and the tables without anybody pushing it.
What it is doing is simpler than it looks: going from one named place on a map to another named place on a map, without bumping into anything, carrying something.
The four jobs
Hybot's robots do four things:
- Deliver an order — take food or drink from the pass to a table.
- Collect an order — go and fetch something from a point.
- Deliver a bill — take the bill to a table.
- Collect dishes — take used plates back.
They can also simply be sent to a named point, which is what a hotel uses when it wants a robot to guide a guest somewhere.
How it finds its way
The building is mapped once, during installation. Places that matter get names: table twelve, the pass, the lift lobby, the charging dock. After that the robot plans a route between named points and uses its sensors to deal with everything the map does not know about — a pushed-out chair, a queue, a person looking at their phone.
If something is in the way it slows down or stops. That is the right behaviour even when it is inconvenient. How service robots navigate goes further into it.
The bit people find surprising
The robot usually does not decide that the delivery finished. A person does.
Many tasks contain a confirmation step: the robot arrives, waits, and only continues once somebody acknowledges it. In a restaurant there is a small flourish — if the guest fills in the short survey on the robot's own screen, that submission confirms the step automatically and the robot releases itself.
What they are not good at
They do not read the room. They cannot judge whether a table is ready, whether a guest is upset, or whether the dish that just came out is wrong. They carry and they guide. Everything that requires judgement is still yours.
A useful way to think about it: the robot removes the walking, not the hospitality.
Where to read more
- What is a service robot? — the fuller explanation
- Are service robots safe around people?
- Service robots by venue type
Other audiences: venue operators, developers, people wanting to work here.
Frequently asked questions
Is it a robot waiter?
- Not really. It carries things between two points and waits for a person to take them. Taking an order, reading a room and dealing with a complaint are still human work, and any vendor suggesting otherwise has not watched a busy service.
How does it know where to go?
- The building is mapped once during setup, and named points of interest are marked on the map — table twelve, the kitchen pass, the charging dock. The robot navigates between those points and uses sensors to avoid people, chairs and anything else that appears in front of it.
What happens if someone stands in its way?
- It slows down or stops and waits. That is the correct behaviour even though it is occasionally annoying, because the alternative — a machine that pushes past a person to stay on schedule — is not a machine anyone should put in a dining room.
Who takes the food off the tray?
- A person. Many tasks include a confirmation step where the robot waits at the table until somebody acknowledges it, then carries on or returns. The robot does not decide that the handover happened; a human tells it.
Do they charge themselves?
- Yes. Each robot has a battery threshold, and below it the robot takes itself to charge and stops being given work. Battery level is also one of the factors used when deciding which robot should take a job in the first place.
Where this fits
This page is part of Hybot for every audience. If you are working through the topic in order, these are the neighbouring pages.
Service robots for business operators
For the person who has to justify the spend: what a Hybot deployment actually involves, what we can measure, and the questions to ask before you sign anything.
Build on Hybot: the developer's view
A REST and WebSocket API over a real robot fleet: dispatch to a point of interest, create tasks, stream live state, and integrate with a vendor-agnostic robot layer.
Working at Hybot
How Hybot hires, what the work involves, and how to send a speculative application. We list no fake vacancies and never keep applications warm.
The next step from here
One conversation, routed to the person who can answer it rather than to a general inbox.