Abstract
The development of service robotics comes along with the development of industrial robotics. Service robots are designed to perform professional job tasks as well as for service users in areas of everyday life. One of the fields for service robots' application is medicine. This chapter determines the opinions of the university students who have tourism education towards tasks that may be performed by the robots. The research question was “in which hotel department the robots might be employed”. In total, 396 valid surveys were collected from the students, Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis-H Tests were conducted to test the hypotheses. It was found that gender, department, and grade are significantly effective on the students' opinions towards tasks that might be performed by service robots.
TopIntroduction
Digital technologies are transforming many industries and creating new challenges that require understanding. These may be stated as speed of change, cultural transformation, defining the skills for the future, outdated regulations and financing of digital and physical systems. TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) (2016) states that by year 2018 the number of robots to be used in the industry will be approximately 3 million and the number of interconnected devices will increase to 29 billion, by year 2025 economic impact created by industrial robots will be annually between 0,6 and 1,2 trillion USD and by year 2030 digital technologies will have strong effects on productivity, income distribution and environment. On the other hand, it is foreseen that only in Europe investments worth 140 billion Euros will be made until 2020 (Çelik, Güleryüz, & Özköse, 2018:87). The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) forecasts that sales of service robots will grow between 20 and 25 per cent by 2020 (Windsor, 2018).
Aim of this chapter to explore the opinions of the university students who have tourism education, towards tasks may be performed by the robots. The research question was “in which hotel department the robots might be employed”.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Robotic Applications in Hotels: Usage of robotic Technologies such as social or service robots and chatbots in hotels.
Social Robot: A robot that can manage and interact with human and other autonomous systems within the assigned social rules and the tasks assigned to it.
Mechanical Turk: A mechanical chess player.
Robot: An automatic, electrically powered device that can be used to perform a specific job or various tasks when programmed, used in place of human in hazardous work in factories.
Service Robot: A robot that assist, help and support people for their own environment.
HRI (Human-Robot Interaction): Interaction between social or service robots and humans.
Henn-na Hotel: A hotel that is operated by only robots.