Rogers, in collaboration with ICICS are excited to welcome Anna to UBC. Anna will assist in alleviating some of the traffic, confusion and general chaos of new students arriving at UBC this September. She is currently in the process of being trained to help orient new students at the UBC bookstore at the start of the term. Anna; however, is no ordinary assistant. Anna is a Kiwibotchi, an autonomous service robot powered by 5G, AI and Edge Analytics.
A Kiwibot technician programming ANNA to help with orientation at the UBC Bookstore
Once trained Anna and three other Kiwibotchis will be deployed in the UBC Bookstore where they will navigate and engage with students. The service robots will be trained to do a variety of tasks designed to give students a unique, positive and engaging experience adhering to UBC values and priorities. For example, Anna and her colleagues could help students in: finding books, offering real-time info about similar texts, providing information on upcoming events or promotions, and more. The robots are able to provide all these services and more while engaging students in a conversational manner. Using Large Language Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (LLM & RAG), they will be able to answer student questions with contextual nuance.
This pilot project intends to showcase how 5G, AI and robotics can integrate into public service environments in practical and human-centered ways. UBC, ICICS and Rogers researchers will observe the nature of student interactions with the robot to help build a research dataset on human-robot interaction, emotion recognition and real-time AI learning.
For more information on the Kiwibotchis: robot.com