Understanding Robotics in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Introduction

We live in a period when robots play a variety of important tasks in our society. Robots can be found everywhere, from factories to households, in comic books to movies, and even in the Holy Bible (Revelation 9 NIV, n.d.). This gives rise to the question, What is a Robot?. The name “Robot” originated from a science fiction play “Rossum’s Universal Robots” by the Czech writer Karel Capek (Long, 2011). The play depicts men which are mechanical and are made to work in factories and which rebel against humans. “A robot can be defined as a goal oriented machine that can sense, plan and act” (Corke, 2017).

Figure 1.

Asimov three laws of robotics

The expression “robotics” was first referenced by the American sci-fi author in 1942 by Isaac Asimov in one of the story called Runabout (Huat, 2006). In comparison to Capek, he had a far broader and more optimistic view of the robot's role in human culture. He viewed robots as man's helpers. Asimov defined robotics as the science of studying robots. He established the well-known Three Laws of Robotics, as seen in Figure 1.

Robotics has progressed from science fiction to reality in the last few decades. Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, software, and artificial intelligence (AI) are just a few of the orders that are consolidated in modern robotics. The primary purpose of robotics is the development of robots/gadgets that fulfil client-defined tasks. In logical words, the rapid expansion of the area has propelled the advancement of numerous types of robots such as industrial, service, aerial, humanoids, and social robots, among others. Figure 2 depicts the evolution of robotics over the last decades as an amalgamation of numerous generations of robots. The development of the first transistor (Bondyopadhyay, 1998) through integrated circuits (Laudon et al., 2007), eventually leading to the digital computer (Bryson, 1996), has influenced the growth of robotics. These revolutionary advances further improved the robots and created a significant difference in their evolution from solely mechanical or pressure-driven devices to conform to programmable frameworks, which can now even learn about their environment.

Figure 2.

Different robot generations

In light of the attributes and the properties of robots, a characterization of robots has been done into five generations as discussed below.

Generation 0: Pre-Robots

The Leonardo Da Vinci in 1495 imagined the design of first humanoid robot (Gates, 2008). Next years, extraordinary machines were made utilizing mechanical components that helped the general public and the business. The computerized mechanical machines of this age were in light of pneumatic or water driven systems, lacking of any processing limit and were overseen by the humans.

Figure 3.

The Colossus computer

Source: Detwiler (2010)

The main robotization methods were the punch cards (Laskow, 2014), utilized to enter data to various apparatus (for example for controlling material weaving machines). The main electronic PCs, for instance, the Colossus (Detwiler, 2010) as shown in Figure 3, likewise used punch cards for the programming.