2021 | Bars & Restaurants | Early stage | Estonia | SDG8
Yanu Service robot

1. General

Category

Other

Please describe Other

Food & Beverages, Service Robotics, Lack of Workforce.

Category

Bars & Restaurants

2. Project Details

Company or Institution

Yanu

Project

Yanu Service robot

General description of the AI solution

We are building an autonomous, contactless, AI-powered robot bartender "Yanu" to change the future of bartending and servicing customers in busy venues around the world. It is fast, compact, standalone, asks no salary, communicates, identifies, and takes payments. It is something that will cut your costs dramatically and boost your business revenues to new highs.

Website

https://yanu.ai

Organisation

Yanu

3. Aspects

Excellence and Scientific Quality: Please detail the improvements made by the nominee or the nominees’ team or yourself if your applying for the award, and why they have been a success.

The AI is used in robot movements, chatbot functionality, machine learning, and vision analysis. We are still in prototyping and development mode. TRL2-TRL3 are the phases.

Scaling of impact to SDGs: Please detail how many citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses this has had or can have a positive impact on, including particular groups where applicable and to what extent.

As there were 2.5M service jobs in Food & Beverages + Service sector missing and Covid has nearly doubled that number, our solution responds to the very needs of venue owners all over the world. Also, the sudden need for contactless service has ramped up interest towards us significantly. The AI we are developing has a supportive function in generating as lifelike service experience as possible, so it would not be a vending machine but a talking, a fast and entertaining solution to replace those missing people in the industry. We strongly believe thatYanu responds to all those points and solves a huge problem around the world.

Scaling of AI solution: Please detail what proof of concept or implementations can you show now in terms of its efficacy and how the solution can be scaled to provide a global impact ad how realistic that scaling is.

Feedback from our pilots has been very positive. We are in the process of production optimization, so we can start manufacturing, here in Estonia. We are able to produce ~100 units the first year, then scale to 500 and then up to 10 000 per year. This solution brings a whole new user base plus creates important big data on human behavior, valuable for several sectors and academic and governmental institutions. We have 181 companies waiting to run a pilot with us.

Ethical aspect: Please detail the way the solution addresses any of the main ethical aspects, including trustworthiness, bias, gender issues, etc.

There is always an issue of "robots robbing the jobs" but anyone who knows the topic more than just through media hysteria knows that it is completely false. In our area there is a huge need for people, to do the jobs that are less and less attractive, and now holds a health hazard too. Three components listed are met more or less, the legislation in some countries should be analyzed still and robot certified for use but we are working on that hard. Added value components are sustainability, innovation, service speed and quality, reduced expenses and waste.

CONTACT

International Research Centre
on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI)
under the auspices of UNESCO 

Jožef Stefan Institute
Jamova cesta 39
SI-1000 Ljubljana

info@ircai.org
ircai.org

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