LG’s Adorable New CLOi Bots May Be Your Future Personal Butlers

The future is exciting, especially for lazy people. Lifting a finger to do a chore in today’s automated world is just so passé, and robot helpers are in demand. Thing is, they’re usually restricted to vacuum cleaners, or similar boring machines, but LG could soon make things a whole lot more exciting with its new CLOi (pronounced KLOH-ee) robots.

LG Shopping Cart Robot

Shopping Cart Robot

Human-sized, and peculiarly adorable, these new bots will be unveiled at CES 2018 – the numero uno breeding ground for fresh and innovative tech idea, and they could set a new template for robot butlers in the future. Could is the key word as LG has not made them available commercially yet, so consumers won’t be able to buy them.
Bummer, we know. But you may be able to see them around pretty soon. Split into three concepts, each of the CLOi bots has different uses. There’s the Serving Robot, the Porter Robot, and the Shopping Cart Robot, all of which have come after the Airport Guide Robot and Airport Cleaning Robot, which recently completed successful trial runs at Korea’s Incheon International Airport.
LG Porter Robot

Porter Robot

LG Serving Robot

Serving Robot

Basically, these robots carry stuff so you don’t have to. The Serving Robot is an automated waiter, carrying meals and drinks to customers with its built-in sliding tray. The Porter Robot takes care of your luggage and handles check-in services, while the Shopping Cart Robot lets shoppers scan items and view prices using an embedded barcode reader.
What they cannot do, however, is draw from artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand how you feel. Even then, smart home assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home can’t do that just yet. Though that could be the next step in making LG’s CLOi bots true blue personal butlers.
Hopefully, they’ll be available to the public when that happens.
Stay tuned for updates when CES 2018 rolls around.
For more information, visit lg.com/sg.
Images: LG