Restaurant Service Robots Development in Thailand and Their Real Environment Evaluation

This paper describes our development of service robots evaluated in real restaurants. Our objective is to develop two types of robot for 1) taking orders from customers and 2) delivering an order to the table. This project is done in collaboration between Bangkok University and MK Restaurants Group Public Company Limited. To achieve this objective, we have applied simple technologies from our experiences at the robot competition called Robocon. We have evaluated each of our robots for six months in a real environment where five branches of the MK restaurant chain are located in the Bangkok area of Thailand, from 2009 to 2012. In the evaluation, robots provided 14,280 services and attracted the interest of 235,680 customers. "Lessons Learned" from this four-year project have been summarized, and should prove useful to similar service robot development projects.