Japan Robot Hotel Sacks Half of its Robots

A Japanese hotel that ran entirely on robots has culled half of its staff.

The team at Japan’s Henn-na ‘Strange’ Hotel have decided to lay off half its 243 robots because it was found that the tasks could be completely better and more efficiently by human staff.

The first robot to lose its job was doll-shaped assistant, Churi, which was found in every hotel room. It was meant to answer basic questions about nearby attractions – similar to the likes of Alexa and Google Assistant – but it was unable to provide these answers.

And the luggage carrying robots found themselves in the firing line for their unreliability as they regularly got stuck when passing each other. There are 100 rooms in the hotel and these two robots were only able to get to about 24 of them and would also cease to work if there was any rain or snow.

The concierge robot has disappeared, being replaced by a human, whist the two most unusual robots – the velociraptor robots – which had been positioned at the check-in desk also found themselves without a job as humans regularly had to get involved in their work, including scanning guests’ passports, for example, the Wall Street Journal reports.