Lost airline passengers will now find a robot Spencer guiding them around at the busy Schipol airport at Amsterdam this week.

Dutch airline KLM is considering using robots in assisting clients around the airport soon because of cases of people who lost money when they could not get to the right gate in time.

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Professor Achim Lilienthal of computer science and also the project leader of Orebro University mentioned that challenges are encountered when navigating an airport since there is a lot of glass. There is also a constantly changing environment in terms of temporary obstructions like parked luggage trolleys and people everywhere.

Researchers from five European states developed a robot Spencer or also called socially situation-aware perception and action for cognitive robots that will temporarily take up its duty as an airport guide on Nov. 30 so that nervous passengers will not miss a flight during the holiday season travels.

A product of 36 months of work, six universities, and  4,274,181 € of funding, Spencer has navigation with a combination of built-in maps for permanent structures such as walls and maps its immediate surroundings with lasers. Its real-life experiences will be incorporated. In March 2016, it will face evaluation when European Commission representatives attend its official premiere.

Dealing with moving people is Spencer's trickiest part. Spencer is programmed to recognize and calculate various ways of getting the lost passenger to a designated destination with no confusion on the constant stream of people moving around.

Spencer is also trained to understand human behavior and will not be running over groups in the airport. It knows how to move around the people in its way. Knowing how long these obstructions will last or be in a specific post is difficult and will be harder for Spencer to identify its own location.

There are plans to use Spencer to update passengers on flight delays in future with a range of languages as communication. Lilienthal also added that not only airports but also autonomous tracks, for example, are possible places of work for the robot to be able to function better in their interaction with humans.

Tagsrobot Spencer, airline passengers, Amsterdam, schipol airport, Achim Lilienthal, airline KLM, Robots, airports