Can a service robot use a lift?

Lift use depends on the robot hardware and on whether the lift can be integrated at the building. It is a survey question, not a software one, and it is the single item that most often decides whether a multi-floor hotel deployment is one fleet or one fleet per floor.

How does the robot handle a different map on every floor?

Each floor holds its own plan image and its own set of points of interest. The mapping between the robot's coordinates and the plan is stored per floor as an affine transform, so a floor is aligned once and every later map import lands in the right place.

What happens if the hotel is refurbished and the layout changes?

Points are re-imported from the robot and re-placed against the stored alignment, so the alignment itself does not have to be redone. If a relocalisation shifts everything, one Realign action moves every point by a single vector instead of dragging them one by one.

Do guests need an app to interact with the robot?

No. Guest interaction happens on the robot's own screen or through a QR code that opens a normal web page. Nothing is installed on a guest device, which matters when the average guest stays two nights.

Is there a published hotel deployment to look at?

Not yet. This page describes what the platform does rather than a hotel that is running it. When a hotel deployment is live and the client approves being written about, it will be linked from here with measured figures.

Hotels

Service robots for hotels

A hotel service robot carries items between fixed points in the building — front desk to a floor, a floor to a room door, a restaurant to a table. Hybot stores a separate map and its own named points for every floor, so a robot can be sent to a destination on any level by name rather than by coordinates.

The hotel problem is vertical, not horizontal

A restaurant is one room. A hotel is a stack of corridors connected by a lift, and almost every errand crosses a floor boundary. That changes which part of the platform matters: in a restaurant the interesting question is how the queue is scored, and in a hotel it is how the building is mapped.

Hybot models a venue as a set of floors. Each floor carries its own plan image and its own configurable points of interest — the desk, the lifts, a service corridor, a room door, a restaurant table. A task names a point, not a position, so a request is legible to staff and survives the building being re-measured.

Mapping a building once

The part that saves the most work over a deployment's life is the persistent robot-to-canvas mapping. The robot reports positions in its own coordinate frame; the floor plan is an image. Hybot stores an affine transform per floor, so the plan is aligned once with rotate, flip, scale and pan tools and every subsequent map import lands correctly. Alignment never has to be redone.

From there the plan becomes the source of truth rather than a picture of one. Push to Robot drives the robot's own point list from the plan, with a preview listing exactly which points would move, be added or be deleted, and nothing is applied until that preview is confirmed. Before every push the translation is re-estimated from the linked markers using a median residual with outliers dropped, so a stale cached offset is never pushed onto a robot. If three or more points — and more than half of those linked — would move at once, the moves are unticked and a warning appears, because a bulk shift is almost always a symptom rather than an intention.

The last forty robot point snapshots per floor are kept and can be restored, and the last fifty plan versions per floor are kept with conflict protection if two devices save at the same time. Full detail is on robot fleet management across every site.

What the robot carries

Hybot's shipped task types are delivery, collection, bill delivery and order taking, and a robot can also be dispatched directly to a named point. In a hotel that covers the errands that are genuinely repetitive: taking an item from the desk to a floor, moving supplies along a service corridor, running food from a restaurant kitchen to a table, and clearing afterwards.

What it does not do is anything requiring a hand — it does not open a guest room door, and it does not hand an item to a specific person unprompted. A confirmation waypoint is how that gap is bridged: the robot waits at the destination until someone confirms the step.

Running several properties from one place

A hotel group is the case the Central Platform was built for. Every property runs as its own project on its own subdomain with a dedicated database, and the platform fleet page shows every robot across every property with serial, state, battery, settings, date added, time in project, and lifetime and daily task and distance totals.

Remote commands are queued centrally and collected by each robot on its next heartbeat, then acknowledged — resetting totals, changing a battery range, toggling auto-assign or auto-charge. Updates roll out per project rather than being forced across the estate, so one property can take a release before the rest.

Deployments

There is no published hotel case study yet. The placeholder deployment structure exists and will be filled with a real property when one is live and the client approves being named. Nothing on this page is drawn from a hotel we have not deployed.

Service robots and multi-floor buildings
How service robots navigate
Service robots for restaurants — the other half of a hotel with a dining room

Frequently asked questions

Can a service robot use a lift?: Lift use depends on the robot hardware and on whether the lift can be integrated at the building. It is a survey question, not a software one, and it is the single item that most often decides whether a multi-floor hotel deployment is one fleet or one fleet per floor.
How does the robot handle a different map on every floor?: Each floor holds its own plan image and its own set of points of interest. The mapping between the robot's coordinates and the plan is stored per floor as an affine transform, so a floor is aligned once and every later map import lands in the right place.
What happens if the hotel is refurbished and the layout changes?: Points are re-imported from the robot and re-placed against the stored alignment, so the alignment itself does not have to be redone. If a relocalisation shifts everything, one Realign action moves every point by a single vector instead of dragging them one by one.
Do guests need an app to interact with the robot?: No. Guest interaction happens on the robot's own screen or through a QR code that opens a normal web page. Nothing is installed on a guest device, which matters when the average guest stays two nights.
Is there a published hotel deployment to look at?: Not yet. This page describes what the platform does rather than a hotel that is running it. When a hotel deployment is live and the client approves being written about, it will be linked from here with measured figures.

Where this fits

This page is part of Smart robotic solutions by industry. If you are working through the topic in order, these are the neighbouring pages.

Service robots for restaurants
Restaurant service robots run food, drinks, bills and dish collection between the kitchen and the table, and take orders at the table through a kiosk screen.
Service robots for healthcare
Healthcare delivery robots move supplies, samples and meals between named points on a ward so clinical staff spend less of a shift walking corridors.
Service robots for offices and workplaces
Office service robots handle internal deliveries, refreshment runs and visitor guidance between named points, and show information on screen between tasks.

Tell us about the venue

Pricing depends on unit count, layout and integration work, so we quote against a real site rather than publishing a package.

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