Autonomous Waiter Robot System for Recognizing Customers, Taking Orders, and Serving Food

Abstract

Existing food delivery robots are not fully autonomous and require human guidance for their movements. Although they can perform simple human-robot interaction (HRI) tasks, they cannot find waving customers or take orders. In this paper, we propose an autonomous robot system that performs waiter tasks, such as finding customers, taking orders, and serving food. The proposed method uses a human support robot with human and action recognition to identify waving customers. It estimates the chair position of the customer using semantic mapping. The robot moves toward the customer and takes orders through speech recognition. Finally, the robot takes the order to the kitchen and delivers it to the customer. The proposed method was implemented in an actual restaurant, and it received high customer evaluation. The experimental results are available at https://youtu.be/KOu9h3tjzDI.