AI security patrol robot appears at Kyoto Station Porta
Yoshie Doi
On a Saturday in June, I visited Kyoto Station’s underground shopping center, Porta. At that time, an AI patrol security robot was patrolling the underground mall. Seven or eight years ago, there was a time when a humanoid robot greeted us at a bank counter, and this time it was a patrol robot.
The voice was human-like and had the same tone as train, bus, and Shinkansen announcements. For people born in the Showa era, it is an incident that robots patrol the Kyoto station building as security.
According to Porta’s website, they will conduct a demonstration experiment of security patrol robots for a few days in June, which is the first underground shopping arcade in Japan. It seems that in 2022, cleaning robots and security patrol robots were introduced for the first time in Kyoto.
It was the first time I encountered a patrol robot, and it was a moment when I felt the change of the times. If this were Tokyo, it would be easy to accept, but if you think about it, Kyoto people love new things and innovative things. Kyoto is a city where tradition and innovation coexist.
Nowadays, automatic vacuum cleaners and automatic dishwashers are widely used in homes, and it is inevitable that such automatic vacuum cleaners will become popular in public spaces. In the future, there will be more and more stores doing this kind of work. In the current shortage of manpower, it will become commonplace.
If that happens, the value of cultural inheritance inherited from our predecessors will increase, such as art that only humans can do, crafts that only skilled craftsmen can do, and coexistence with nature that creates excitement. Kyo-Suzume will support them so that they can start initiatives in various fields that can only be done in Kyoto.
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