Summary
Tourism is a big business and when it comes to business, automation is always on the table. So what about your next tour around a tourist attraction being led by a robot? With more robots being used in the hospitality industry, it might happen sooner than you think.
Why Automate Tourism?
Believe it or not, tour guides aren’t a dime a dozen. A good tour guide needs to learn an immense number of facts, has to have the right personality, and great physical fitness. Replacing a tour guide is expensive and time-consuming and the demands of tourism means that there aren’t always enough qualified guides around.
Robotic tour guides have been around for quite some time. First, there were stationary computerized tour stops where the job of a tour guide was essentially done by a kiosk system. In the late 90s, wheeled robots were put to use, such as theRHINOtour guide robot.
Now, with numerous advancements in robot mobility and artificial intelligence, we won’t have to put up with a beeping trashcan on wheels to show us around a museum.
The 5 G-TOURS EU Project
As part of a project to see how 5G cellular technology could be used to make advanced automated systems, known as the 5 g-TOURS EU research project, a team of researchers set about create a mobile robot platform that can guide visitors.
Using the R1 robotic platform, the actual “brains” of the robot is in the cloud. Thanks to the low-latency of 5G, it’s practical for a computer to operate a robot remotely, and that’s just what this team set out to do.
Since this was a 2020 project, it predates the recent boom in generative AI as seen with chatbots like ChatGPT, but it’s still pretty impressive!
Boston Dynamics Spot in Tour Guide Mode
What really impressed me was a demo by Boston Dynamics, where they combined their Spot robot dog with ChatGPT. This allowed people to converse freely and dynamically with the robot, and by using ChatGPT’s image recognition system, the robot knows what it’s looking at and can comment on it sensibly.
They were able to infuse different personas into the system, which means that you could have several different “guides” that offer variations on the experience. This demo was done several generations of ChatGPT ago and both the software and the fields of robotics have come along since. Not to mention, there were some creepy yet strikingly impressive"realistic" humanoid robots at CES 2025among theweird crittersandvacuums with arms.
Human Tour Guides Have More to Offer
I think automated tourism systems like guide robots will definitely have a place, but I do enjoy having a human tour guide that actually has feelings and opinions about things. Perhaps some future version of ChatGPT will convince me it cares about art or about dinosaur skeletons, but for now a passionate tour guide who enjoys their work is my preferred way of exploring a place.
Of course, we have so many options compared to traditional tourism these days. you may do museum tours in VR, for example, or just watch a beautiful documentary on a modern 4K TV.
That said, I suppose in some countries it’s extra hard finding enough people who can speak the primary language of tourist groups, and I can even imagine a robot tour guide being an assistant to a human. Alternatively, imagine renting a guide robot for the duration of your vacation that can help you get around and communicate anywhere.
Tour guides are likely just the early examples of the types of public robots that will become commonplace in the next few years. Long before most of us can afford sophisticatedhousehold bots, we’ll be running into them at restaurants, museums, and anywhere else lots of people need to be served efficiently.
