Japan Airlines (JAL) will start using humanoid robots in ground handling tasks at Tokyo’s Haneda airport from May, in a two-year trial it said is aimed at easing employees’ workload.<\/p>\n
For a start, the Chinese-made robots will be deployed to load and unload cargo containers, JAL and GMO AI & Robotics, its partner in the project, said in a demonstration to the media on Monday.<\/p>\n
Japan’s aviation industry is wrestling with a labour crunch brought on by an increase in inbound tourism and a declining working-age population, said JAL, which employs some 4,000 ground handling staff.<\/p>\n
The carrier hopes that these robots can also be used to clean cabins and operate ground support equipment in future.<\/p>\n
Robots are already being used in some airports across Japan, including for security patrol and retail.<\/p>\n
Japan welcomed more than seven million foreign visitors in the first two months of this year, according to statistics from JTB Group, which runs Japan’s largest travel agency.<\/p>\n
“While airports appear highly automated and standardised, their back-end operations still rely heavily on human labour and face serious labour shortages,” GMO AI & Robotics’ president Tomohiro Uchida told reporters.<\/p>\n
Using robots for physically demanding tasks will “provide significant benefits to employees”, Kyodo news agency quoted Yoshiteru Suzuk, the president of JAL’s Ground Service, saying.<\/p>\n
But he noted that some duties, including safety management, can only be handled by humans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Japan Airlines (JAL) will start using humanoid robots in ground handling tasks at Tokyo’s Haneda airport from May,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,266289,266285,266286,266287,266288,101041,155085,74],"class_list":["post-613350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-cargo-containers","tag-gmo-ai-robotics","tag-ground-handling","tag-ground-support-equipment","tag-haneda-airport","tag-humanoid-robots","tag-japan-airlines","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}