Image credit – KYODO
Being disabled means that there are certain physical things that you cannot do. This is more than just an inconvenience as it also affects a person’s employability, where for example not being able to walk essentially excludes the person from having a job as a waiter. However over in Tokyo, a cafe is hoping to change that.
Opening in the Akasaka district this coming November, this cafe will be employing the use of robots to help serve food and drinks to its patrons. Now robots in the F&B industry aren’t exactly new, but what makes this cafe’s robots different is that they will be remotely controlled by the disabled.
According to Kentaro Yoshifuji, the CEO of Orby Lab who developed the OriHime-D robots that will be used in the cafe, “I want to create a world in which people who can’t move their bodies can work too.” These robots can be controlled by users with various disabilities, even severe ones where as long as the person can move their eyes, they will be able to control them.
The cafe’s operations will be part time at launch, where they will only open on weekdays from the 26th of November to the 7th of December, but the company behind the robots is hoping to eventually setup a more permanent cafe in the future, and hope to see more adoption by companies leading up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.
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