Savioke Relay+ Features New Mechanical Elevator Interface and Knocks Down a Major Hurdle to Product Acceptance

Analysis:
The original Savioke Relay was designed to operate in hotels to deliver sundry items from the front desk to guest rooms. The company is one of the first to deploy its solutions solely in a robots as a service (RaaS) business model.

Savioke quickly learned that each hotel had an elevator from a different elevator vendor, and depending on the vintage of the elevator and the breadth of local laws, that it was difficult to gain automatic control over the operation of a public elevator. The result was that many customer installations slipped months behind schedule while permits were attained and inspections were passed.

As a result, the Relay+ was engineered to use a mechanical actuator along with vision guidance and AI to quickly learn the configuration of any building's physical elevator controls (i.e. the buttons used by humans). This process can be completed in as little as four hours, after which, the Relay+ is able to successfully make deliveries from the front desk to any room in the facility. – Mike Oitzman