Robot Kejia offers shopping guide service in the shopping mall of Hefei with 3 months of probation period

“Kejia” is offering shopping guide service to customers

    The robot “Kejia”from USTC is a star of playing area, but recently she intends to change the cause focus and go to the "mall" to work hard for a career. Yesterday, reporters from JiangHuai Morning News  learned from USTC that "Kejia" has worked in Goocoo Plaza for a period of time, specially responsible for guidance and shopping guide.
 
 “Kejia” is providing shopping guide service for you
    “Hello! May I help you?”
    “I want to buy children"s garments.”
    “xx store has children"s garments. Which one do you want to go?”
    “I want to go to xx store, can you take me there?”
    “Ok, please follow me.”
     This was the scene the reporter saw in Goocoo Plaza in the afternoon of January 13. In red and black formal attire, “Kejia” welcomed visitors and saw them off in the mall via wheels instead of walking.
    Independently developed by USTC, “Kejia cloud interaction robot” will be here to complete the three-month “probation period”.
    This is the first time that “Kejia” has entered into large public places to carry out large-scale autonomous navigation under conditions of large numbers of people.

When facing onlookers, she will be shy and stop walking
    “Kejia” is responsible for the ground floor with an area of over 20,000 square meters; there are a lot of shops with great passenger flow volume.
However, after receiving the oral instructions of customers, she could quickly identify the location and take customers to the designated shops. Well, how did she do it?
    “We let her memorize the plane of shopping mall and position of shops, so she is able to find the place quickly if you tell her the name.” director of USTC Robotics Laboratory, Chen Xiaoping said.
    Next, customers on the scene asked “Kejia” to take them to the fast food restaurants and washrooms respectively, she did them one by one. But, once there are too many onlookers, she will be a bit overwhelmed. “When people surround her, she can not move forward, but as long as there is one clear way, she will be able to take people to right places. Compared with laboratory and playing area, it is actually more difficult for “Kejia” to work in the shopping mall. Environmental noise, needs of simultaneous services offered to a large number of customers and the ubiquitous glass curtain wall that is indistinguishable to laser sensor etc. are the environmental characteristics that can not be replicated in the laboratory, thus, a great challenge to the autonomous positioning and navigation method of classical robot and man-machine interactive method appears; frequent intersection between large crowds of people and robots has further increased the difficulty in robot motion control.

Robots will have “changed appearance”
    Reporters learned that the birth of shopping guide “Kejia was supported by two scientific research teams, one is USTC Kejia robot R & D team with the independently developed touring robot as its basic hardware platform and the other is part technology of the cloud robot platform jointly developed by USTC and American Carnegie Mellon University.
    In dialogues, “Kejia” can guide users to make their own shopping needs and preferences, and then provide them with targeted shopping information through a lot of knowledge and information resources on the cloud platform, including information on the goods and services of each shop in the shopping center.
    “Now, the working time for ‘Kejia’ is not long, as debugging and charging will take time." said Chen Xiaoping, "Kejia" is still in test and is making preparations for mass production. “Now ‘Kejia’ is using a fake face, later, she may appear in cartoon images or the image like real person.”
    Reporters learned that “Kejia” cloud interaction robot was developed by USTC-Goocoo Robotics Research Centre, relying on USTC Institutes of Advanced Technology, and it has obtained support from the State Natural Science Foundation of China, 863 Program and Main Direction Program of USTC.