Nov. 26—Hungry passengers waiting to board flights at Pittsburgh International Airport might no longer have to leave their gates. Soon, they could be able to hail a robot vendor to bring them a snack.
An autonomous vending robot run by California-based tech company Ottonomy is being tested at Pittsburgh International as part of Allegheny County Airport Authority's xBridge program. The robot rolls around the terminal on wheels and delivers orders placed through a smartphone app.
Cole Wolfson, xBridge director, said the robot is called Ottobot. As part of the testing, free bottled water and sodas are available for volunteers who order on the app. After a 30-day pilot, the authority hopes to use Ottobot on a bigger scale.
"We will look to validate a business case for operating within PIT with one or more vendors," Wolfson said. "In that stage, the Ottonomy app would offer a menu of available items, and passengers would be able to order and pay for those items via their phones."
Ottonomy CEO Ritukar Vijay believes the robots can be scalable to airports around the world and that Ottobots are better positioned than other autonomous robots because they don't require human assistance.
"Across the globe, airports are similar. There might be large and small ones, but more or less the overall setup is similar," Vijay said in a statement. "If it works at a couple of airports, it is applicable to almost all of them."
Wolfson said he hopes the autonomous vending robots might "help alleviate peaks in customer demand and ease line congestion at concessions."
Allegheny County Airport Authority, which runs Pittsburgh International and Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin, is dedicating funding to test Ottobot but wouldn't say how much.
Ottobot isn't the only autonomous robot at Pittsburgh International Airport. There also are autonomous floor scrubbers roaming the terminal.
Vijay said he believes autonomous robots have a future for practical use at airports.
"Airports are a unique spot. There's some amount of structure and scale," he said. "It is very dynamic where the users are concerned. That kind of dynamic environment, that is very, very important, to figure out how autonomous navigation can be utilized within that space."
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