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Given the recent growth of service robot research in hospitality and tourism management (HTM), the purpose of this study is to identify a research agenda by conducting a systematic and holistic review of service robot research published in both HTM and broader business management (BM) journals.

Adopting a service ecosystem perspective, 38 HTM articles and 13 highly cocited BM articles out of 126 BM articles were qualitatively reviewed to analyze the intellectual structures and foundations of robotics research.

The relationships between service robots and the four multilevel actors of the service ecosystem were analyzed: the consumer, employee, management and society. Twenty-eight specific research questions were proposed for the robotics-customer relationship, robotics-employee relationship, robotics-management relationship and robotics-society relationship.

This study contributes to understanding the intellectual structures and evolution of rapidly growing HTM robotics research in terms of the holistic relationships among the four service ecosystem actors of robotics. Future research needs to identify other actors and their activities to examine the service ecosystem of robotics.

This study provides a pathway for future hospitality and tourism research by helping to focus on important robotics issues and further develop the theoretical and empirical knowledge of robotics. This work informs practitioners of key issues associated with the industrial adoption of robots.

Adapting to the age of the robot will be one of the biggest challenges that managers and workers will have to face. A company that understands survival and success will need to adopt a positive approach to the use of automata, learning about the business implications as robots impact on blue‐ and white‐collar jobs, fundamental departmental functions of production, delivery, storage and merchandising, and company/customer relations. A range of examples illustrates robots' influence to date on warehousing, retailing and manufacturing. Safety training will be important, as well as emotional support and practical guidance for employees working alongside robots. A multi‐functional technology planning task force within the company would be a valuable aspect of overall strategy, delineating possibilities, plans and actions to be taken in the light of constantly updated technology.

Studies the process of implementing industrial robots in Spanish industry. Most of the firms surveyed already had experience of automation and used the first robot to gain experience of this new technology. The training and integration of staff in the project, the firm′s technology level and support from top management were found to be the factors which have the most influence on producing positive results when robots are introduced.

Using the Delphi technique, this paper aims to investigate how human resource experts perceive service robots will impact leadership and human resource management in the hospitality industry.

A three-stage Delphi study with hotel industry human resource experts was conducted to identify the key trends and major challenges that will emerge in the next ten years and how leaders should deal with the challenges brought about by service robot technologies.

The results show that while service robots are anticipated to increase efficiency and productivity of hotel activities, they may also pose challenges such as high costs, skill deficits and significant changes to the organizational structure and culture of hotels. Therefore, the anticipated applications and integration of robotic technology will require leaders of the future to carefully consider the balance between the roles of service robots and human employees in the guest experience and to nurture a work environment that embraces open-mindedness and change.

This is the first type of study to examine hospitality leadership and human resource management in the context of robotized hotels. This study has taken an important step to understand the leadership role in robotized hotels from a human resource perspective and brings clarity as to how robotic technology can influence leadership in the future workplace.

In manufacturing environments, mobile radio frequency identification (RFID) robots need to quickly identify and collect various types of passive tag and active tag sensor data. The purpose of this paper is to design a robot system compatible with ultra high frequency (UHF) band passive and active RFID applications and to propose a new anti-collision protocol to improve identification efficiency for active tag data collection.

A new UHF RFID robot system based on a cloud platform is designed and verified. For the active RFID system, a grouping reservation–based anti-collision algorithm is proposed in which an inventory round is divided into reservation period and polling period. The reservation period is divided into multiple sub-slots. Grouped tags complete sub-slot by randomly transmitting a short reservation frame. Then, in the polling period, the reader accesses each tag by polling. When tags’ reply collision occurs, the reader tries to re-query collided tags once, and the pre-reply tags avoid collisions through random back-off and channel activity detection.

The proposed algorithm achieves a maximum theoretical system throughput of about 0.94, and very few tag data frame transmissions overhead. The capture effect and channel activity detection in physical layer can effectively improve system throughput and reduce tag data transmission.

In this paper, the authors design and verify the UHF band passive and active hybrid RFID robot architecture based on cloud collaboration. And, the proposed anti-collision algorithm would improve active tag data collection speed and reduce tag transmission overhead in complex manufacturing environments.

In a best-case scenario, both organisations and their employees gain from technological changes by staying up to date on developing digitalisation. However, opportunities to learn and use modern technologies may not be shared equally in the workplace. Employee groups can be divided between those with and without access to new technologies. This study aims to examine the extent to which the position of an employee may be associated with the opportunity to work with robots.

Health-care work was chosen as an exemplary context of emerging robotisation. To gain correlative evidence on how the position and technology orientation of an employee associate with access to care robots, the study used online survey data collected from Finnish care workers (N = 226).

Workplace hierarchies were found to play a significant part in robotisation. Management experience increased the probability for an employee to have access to care robots, but this position did not differentiate between the employees in their aspiration to use care robots. Individual interest in technology was associated with robot use only among care workers with no management experience, whereas managers’ access to robots did not depend on their personal interests.

This study brings new information about the equity of robot-use opportunities in workplaces. Distinctive to care robots was the significant number of motivated non-users. Thus, adding to the categories of “have-bots”, “have-nots” and “want-nots”, this study introduces an important group of “want-bots”.

Unlike the historical robots, the contemporary and futuristic ‘working’ robots within organisations are capable of taking decisions without human intervention. This chapter reviews the technical evolution of robots across history with the necessary evolution of operational procedures regarding laws and ethical standards. The objective of this review is to have a futuristic holistic insight into the new generation of robots that are invading our working environment within organisations. Out of the very wide perspective of robotics research field, this chapter only discusses the ‘working’ robots (excluding domestic, social, and warfare robots) in organisations along with its ethical and legal associated issues. To achieve this objective, the recent ‘working robot’ definition and associated expected ethics and laws, termed in this chapter as ‘Ten Commandments’ would be necessary for the utilisation of robotics before releasing ‘intelligent’ robots in the workplace environment. The proposed ‘Ten Commandments’ can be utilised by robot manufacturer to embed ‘machine testimony’ to their products. Providing that such ‘robot ethics’ built as part of the algorithmic structure of robots, a useful innovation like robot–manager is also identified in the organisational environment which can have multiple benefits as discussed in this chapter.

The lagging growth in productivity of many western industries has at last captured public attention. Many observers attribute the problem, at least in part, to management reluctance to invest in the capital equipment necessary to automate production systems at fully competitive levels. Not all such investments, however, result in equivalent benefits. This article presents the findings of a recent survey on robotisation plans, and based on these findings, a conceptual model is developed which attempts to set out the different factors which should be considered when introducing industrial robots. In addition, some attention is given to the related literature on the reasons for automation in general, and robotisation in particular.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the state of the art in energy efficiency for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), focusing on energy sources, consumption models, energy-efficient locomotion, hardware energy consumption, optimization in path planning and scheduling methods, and to suggest future research directions.

The systematic literature review (SLR) identified 244 papers for analysis. Research articles published from 2010 onwards were searched in databases including Google Scholar, ScienceDirect and Scopus using keywords and search criteria related to energy and power management in various robotic systems.

The review highlights the following key findings: batteries are the primary energy source for AMRs, with advances in battery management systems enhancing efficiency; hybrid models offer superior accuracy and robustness; locomotion contributes over 50% of a mobile robot’s total energy consumption, emphasizing the need for optimized control methods; factors such as the center of mass impact AMR energy consumption; path planning algorithms and scheduling methods are essential for energy optimization, with algorithm choice depending on specific requirements and constraints.

The review concentrates on wheeled robots, excluding walking ones. Future work should improve consumption models, explore optimization methods, examine artificial intelligence/machine learning roles and assess energy efficiency trade-offs.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of energy efficiency in AMRs, highlighting the key findings from the SLR and suggests future research directions for further advancements in this field.

Managing archives using robots rather than people can considerably enhance efficiency, while need to modify the structure of archive shelves or installation tracks. This paper aims to develop a fully automated archive access robot without modification.

First, a mobile navigation chassis and a motion algorithm based on laser ranging and map matching are created for autonomous movement to any of the archives’ locations. Second, because the existing archives are stacked vertically, the bionic manipulator is made to mimic the movement of manual access to the archives, and it is attached to the robot arm’s end to access different layers of archives. In addition, an industrial camera is used to complete barcode identification of the archives and acquire data on their location and thickness. Finally, the archive bin is created to store archives.

The robot can move, identify and access multiple archival copies placed on floors 1–6 and 2–5 cm thick autonomously without modifying the archival repository or using auxiliary devices.

The robot is currently able to navigate, identify and access files placed on different levels. In the future, the speed of the robot’s navigation and the movement of the robot arm could be even faster, while the level of visualization of the robot could be further improved and made more intelligent.

The archive access robot developed by the authors makes it possible for robots to manage archives instead of human, while being cheaper and easier to deploy than existing robots, and has already been tested in the archive storage room of the State Grid maintenance branch in Jiangsu, China, with better results.

The all-in-one archive access robot can replace existing robotic access solutions, promote intelligent management of the archive industry and the construction of unmanned archive repositories and provide ideas for the development of robots for accessing book-like materials.

This study explores the use of robots to identify and access archives without changing archive shelves or installing auxiliary devices. In this way, the robot can be quickly applied to the storage room to improve the efficiency of archive management.