Development of e-butler: Introduction of robot system in hospitality with mobile application

Abstract

During the pandemic, many hotels started to apply strict health protocols for social distancing by reducing the number of its employees. In our research, we would like to develop an application based on E-Butler service robot, called as BeeButler, to solve the problem. The term "E-butler robot" refers to a robot that is designed specifically for use as a butler or a steward in the hotel. Typically, the robot performs small-scale butler duties like delivering amenities, ordered by customer. BeeButler robot adopted line follower model and used RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) for localization based on four mecanum wheels. It is equipped with teleconference devices based on Jetson Nano to facilitate communication. In this paper, mobile application is developed for BeeButler robot with Flutter framework, which use Dart as the programming language. Furthermore, Firebase is used as the database to maintain the data of the amenities, hotel information, and user data. The application handles the order and the BeeButler robot will operate in a case when customers has made a request on amenities through mobile application. In the process of developing the application, we used the waterfall method as our foundation to build the application. Finally, the results of the testing on mobile application for the BeeButler robot are presented. It showed that our BeeButler Application can carry out the main task of E-butler which can substitute human butlers in hotels.