FEDA publishes Q&As with new member companies. This week's newsletter features manufacturer member OrionStar Robotics, a company that produces service and food delivery robots used by restaurants in more than 40 countries to reduce labor costs and improve efficiency.
Who is your customer base?
The customer base of service robot companies may include, but is not limited to:
- Restaurants, fast-food chains and cafes can utilize service robots for food delivery, dirty dishes collecting, self-ordering, self-checkout, and seating assistance. Robots can help restaurants reduce costs, improve efficiency, alleviate the challenge of hiring staff, and free service personnel from repetitive and physical tasks. This enables servers to focus more on customer needs and perform higher-value tasks. Moreover, it provides customers with a futuristic and innovative dining experience.
- Supermarkets and retail companies can utilize service robots for product displays, promotions and customer inquiries.
- Factories can utilize service robots for component transportation.
- Museums, exhibition halls and corporate showrooms can utilize service robots for introductions, guided tours and service inquiries.
Furthermore, due to service robots' autonomous navigation and voice interaction capabilities, they can also provide services such as item delivery and information consultation in settings such as hospitals, nursing homes, libraries, hotels, airports, and KTV (karaoke television) establishments.
As of March 2023, OrionStar has deployed over 48,000 robots in more than 40 countries, covering over 20 industries and scenarios.
What kinds of equipment do you sell?
OrionStar develops, manufactures and sells service robots, including, but not limited to, intelligent food delivery robots such as LuckiBot and LuckiBot Pro and intelligent voice interaction robots like GreetingBot Mini. OrionStar provides robotics solutions for different scenarios, including restaurants, supermarkets, factories, etc.
What roles can your robots perform in a restaurant?
In a restaurant, our robots can perform the following roles:
- Restaurant Entrance Greeter: Attracting and welcoming customers at the restaurant entrance.
- Table Escort: Guiding and leading customers to their designated tables.
- Intelligent Ordering: Assisting customers with smart ordering systems.
- Smart Payment: Facilitating convenient and efficient payment processes.
- Intelligent Food Delivery: Safely and accurately delivering food orders to customers' tables.
- Table Bussing: Collecting dirty dishes from tables.
What sets OrionStar’s products across from other serving robots?
With a focus on innovation, OrionStar has built a comprehensive AI technology chain. It has developed operating systems such as Robot OS and Voice OS and navigation technology. Additionally, the company possesses full-stack hardware design and manufacturing capabilities. Furthermore, OrionStar offers on-site and cloud-based services to deploy service robots seamlessly. OrionStar robots have notable comparative advantages, including:
- OrionStar offers an open system, which supports more secondary development and compatibility with a wider range of software and hardware devices. This allows for greater flexibility in customizing and optimizing the robot for specific use cases and enables easier integration with other systems and devices.
- Equipped with a high-performance Qualcomm 845 chip, OrionStar provides more powerful computing capabilities, resulting in a better user experience. The hardware components, including the microphone array, camera and navigation system, are top-of-the-line in terms of performance, ensuring reliable and efficient operation.
- OrionStar robots excel in industry-leading voice interaction capabilities. It integrates Google Dialogflow and its self-developed ChatMax platform, enabling customers to quickly customize enterprise-level and scenario-specific content. The ChatMax platform incorporates multiple large language models, including ChatGPT, allowing the robot to rapidly learn and respond to context-specific questions. Furthermore, it supports up to 90 natural language interactions, enhancing user experience and catering to various applications.
There’s a big move toward more kitchen automation in recent years. How do your front-of-the-house robots fit with that back-of-the-house trend? Are there ways they can support kitchen operations?
In May 2023, OrionStar Robotics released a Fully Automated Restaurant Solution. The solution integrates AI-powered robots with self-ordering and self-checkout devices, kitchen display systems (KDS), table trackers, and robot call buttons, enabling the robots to perform multiple roles - from order takers and food runners to table bussers.
- Robot Kiosk's Order and Pay Solution enables customers to conveniently order and pay directly through the robot, with support for third-party payment, credit cards and server call.
- Smart Positioning Solution integrates with a restaurant's POS system, table tracker and delivery robots, allowing customers to choose seats and associate orders with tables.
- Meal Delivery Solution utilizes autonomous robots to transport food and drinks to designated tables. Once the meal is ready, the KDS calls robots to the pick-up area. Up to 30 robots can work together.
- Smart Summon Solution allows customers to summon a robot to their table with a button for ordering more food or returning dirty dishes.
What excites you about the future of the robotics industry?
The development of robotics technology has brought new opportunities to address issues such as population aging, labor shortages and productivity improvement. The application of robots can help businesses reduce costs, increase efficiency and free humans from repetitive and tedious tasks, allowing them to focus on more creative and valuable work.
Furthermore, the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT has propelled the service robotics industry into a golden age. ChatGPT possesses natural language processing and generation capabilities, enabling more intelligent and human-like conversations and interactions, providing efficient and personalized services. This has created greater potential and market demand for the service robotics industry.
Is there anything else FEDA members should know about your company?
OrionStar Robotics, a global leader in service robotics, is currently seeking partners worldwide. OrionStar is dedicated to supporting partners' success through our valuable products and efficient services. In 2023, our focus lies in service-oriented solutions integrating Product X Service X marketing, addressing industry pain points, creating value, and fostering mutual success.