Airport Robot Guide: From Help Desks to ABB Arms

An airport robot used to be a novelty that posed for selfies near the departure gates. Today the machines in terminals give directions, scrub floors, sell coffee and, in a new pilot in Pittsburgh, walk on four legs to check the air and look for spills. This post follows the work these robots took over, from staffed counters and information desks to self-service kiosks, then the first guide robots at Incheon, and on to the trials announced in September 2026. It also looks at where ABB arms such as YuMi, GoFa and the IRB 1200 Hygienic could fit. Baggage and car parking robots have their own posts.

A guide robot rolling through the departure hall at Singapore Changi Airport, 2023. Photo: Sharon Hahn Darlin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How terminals answered travellers before robots

For most of aviation history, every question in a terminal went to a person. Airline staff at a counter checked the ticket, weighed the bags, wrote out the boarding documents and pointed passengers to the right gate. In 1950 the Dutch photographer Willem van de Poll photographed travellers checking in at a KLM counter, with an agent in a peaked cap writing by hand. Airports added information desks for everything else: where the toilets are, how to reach the city, which carousel has the luggage. Most big airports still run those desks, and keeping them staffed through night flights and in several languages takes a lot of people.

Passengers checking in at a KLM counter in 1950, with the agent writing by hand. Photo: Willem van de Poll / Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The first big change was self-service. Airlines put up their own check-in kiosks, and in 2003 Las Vegas McCarran Airport, the IT company ARINC and twelve airlines launched the first major common-use self-service installation, where one shared kiosk serves many carriers. By the end of 2008 such kiosks were in more than 100 airports. Self bag drop machines followed, along with flight information screens and wayfinding signs. Passengers learned to tap through menus instead of asking someone. A kiosk handles the routine questions well enough. It cannot walk a lost passenger to a gate or wipe up a spilled drink.

Self check-in kiosks in the departures hall of Hong Kong International Airport, 2011. Photo: Mk2010 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Incheon International Airport in South Korea was the first to try robots on a large scale. LG Electronics ran beta tests of airport guide robots and airport cleaning robots there in 2017, ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics, and the guide robots could talk in English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. In 2018 the airport put AIRSTAR into service, described as the first commercial airport guide robot. Pureun Technology built the hardware and LG CNS wrote the software. The 14 units roamed the departure and arrival halls of both terminals, told travellers where to check in, escorted them to the counter and took souvenir photos.

A guide robot among passengers near the duty free shops at Incheon International Airport, 2021. Photo: Sharon Hahn Darlin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

What airport robots do in terminals now

The newest pilot is in Pittsburgh. In late September 2026 Pittsburgh International Airport said it would test four-legged robots from local startup Skild AI in its Airside Terminal through its xBridge innovation programme. Up to four robots and two charging stations are planned, each robot with its own operating area and keep-out zones. The first phase is mobile indoor air quality monitoring, with alerts sent to staff when readings leave set limits. Later phases will look at spotting full bins and spills, watching crowding and delivering food and drinks. "Pittsburgh is a global leader in robotics and AI," said Deepak Nayyar, the airport's chief technology officer.

An autonomous floor cleaning robot working in the terminal at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport, 2022. Photo: Syced / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Airlines are building robots too. In September 2026 Emirates said a new generation of check-in and baggage robots would be launched in the first quarter of 2027. They build on Sara, a prototype that checks passengers in with facial recognition and passport scanning. Keenan Hamza, Emirates' vice-president of innovation, said the baggage robot will recognise a passenger by face, take the suitcase, weigh it and attach the tag without any staff. Cleaning is the most common robot job so far: SoftBank Robotics says more than 200 of its autonomous floor scrubbers work for Flagship teams at 25 airports.

A Japan Airlines robot standing in the terminal at Tokyo Haneda Airport, 2021. Photo: SuFlyer / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB does not make terminal guide robots, but its arms already serve food and drink in public, which is the next job airports are trying out. From August to December 2018 a dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 made coffee for shoppers at the Smartech store in Selfridges, London. For a kiosk in a terminal, the IRB 1200 Hygienic is the nearest fit: ABB aims it at quick service restaurants and kiosks, with an IP67 body and food-grade oil. We cover robot coffee bars in a separate post, and our post on airport baggage handling covers what happens below the floor.

ABB's YuMi making coffee at the Smartech store in Selfridges, London, 2018. Photo: ABB

Where robots in the terminal go next

Robots in terminals are moving toward routine rounds and data collection. Pittsburgh's quadrupeds will measure air quality and report bins and spills, and Emirates wants its machines to finish a check-in without a person stepping in. Behind the shops and cafes, a lot of the work is moving stock and supplies through service corridors. ABB's Flexley Mover AMRs, which navigate with 3D Visual SLAM, could carry carts there as a possibility, although ABB has not announced any airport project of this kind.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

What travellers see at airports also shapes what they will accept at home. Guide robots and floor scrubbers use the same mapping, obstacle detection and voice interfaces as robot vacuum cleaners and home helpers, only in a far busier space. For a cafe kiosk built around an arm, the work starts in the factory. Cells like that are usually laid out and tested in RobotStudio first, and an ABB cobot such as the GoFa CRB 15000 could serve behind glass, with SafeMove limiting where the arm can reach.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

Long term support is the first worry, and Incheon's AIRSTAR shows why: after the contract with LG CNS ended, technical support stopped, broken units could not be repaired, and all 14 robots were scrapped in 2025, seven years after launch, despite 2.8 billion won spent on the robots and their control system. Terminals are crowded with children, trolleys and people looking at their phones, so robots have to stop safely, and Skild's stop when a traveller blocks a sensor. Facial recognition at check-in raises privacy questions, and airports need staff who can map the robots' routes and repair them.

A security robot patrolling Terminal 3 at Narita Airport, 2025. Photo: nagi usano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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