Pepper the Inflight Service Bot

Pepper will be the next generation flight attendant bot.

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Inspiration

The Robot can help in many cases for Airberlin customers, such as checking them in, bringing them food and water. It also would help users to navigate the airport.

What it does

Introducing Pepper the inflight service bot, capable of remembering all flight information for every passenger, details for every flight, communicating in any language imaginable and she doesn't mind cleaning up vomit. Not to mention she can traverse the aisles while other flight staff are required to sit with seat belts secured. In addition, passengers can communicate directly with pepper from their inflight display unit to request anything from water to details about their connecting flights.

How I built it

Pepper was built using the SoftBank Robotics America robot, Pepper, which uses AirBerlin API to get the information then IBM Watson to communicate with passengers in their natural language, or through their inflight display unit using the Panasonic Avionics platform, where it also connects to flight and passenger information. When a passenger needs information about navigating the airport to find a point of interest such as a terminal for a connecting flight, they are provided with an indoor route generated using the Here Maps API, coordinates are pulled from mapbox.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into some problems initially when working with the Pepper robot which we found was unable to move and carry on object at the same time, not a problem in an actual flight situation where a service cart would be available, but made the demo more challenging and it took some time before we realized the robot couldn't move if the power cord cap was opened.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able to program the robot to carry out numerous flight attendant duties including conversing in multiple languages and were able to provide useful information to a passenger using simulated passenger data, including providing the route within the San Francisco airport form the arrival gate to the connecting gate.

What I learned

We learned how to program the robot and pull passenger information from an inflight display API and had the chance to work with numerous brand new APIs to create something completely unique.

Built With

· app.xapix.io/airberlin · softbank · ibm-watson · braintree

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