Meet Your New Office Colleague: A ‘Brainless’ Robot

New employees scurried around the office doing mundane tasks like fetching coffee, delivering meals, and distributing packages. They didn’t get in anyone’s way or violate personal space. And they waited politely for the elevators, with complete politeness. And, perhaps most attractively, they didn’t complain.

It’s because they were robots.

Naver, a South Korean internet conglomerate, has been experimenting with integrating robots into office life for several months. Inside a futuristic, fully industrial, 36-story building on the outskirts of Seoul, a fleet of about a hundred robots navigates on their own, moving from floor to floor in robot-only elevators and sometimes alongside humans, passing through security gates and entering meeting rooms.

Naver’s network of web services, which include a search engine, maps, email and news aggregation, is prevalent in South Korea, but its reach abroad is limited, lacking the global renown of a brand like Naver. Google. The company seeks new ways to grow. In October, it agreed to acquire Poshmark, an online second-hand clothing and goods retailer, for $1.2 billion. Now, Naver sees the software that powers robots in corporate offices as a product that other companies might eventually want.

Robots have found a home in other workplaces such as factories, retail and hotels, but they are absent from the world of office cubicles and conference rooms. There are thorny privacy issues: A machine full of cameras and sensors that roam the corporate halls could be a dystopian tool of corporate surveillance if abused, experts say. Designing a space where machines can move freely without disturbing employees also poses a tricky challenge.

But Naver has done extensive research to ensure its robots – which look like a rolling garbage can – look, move and behave to put employees at ease. And as it develops its own robot privacy rules, it hopes to write the blueprint for the office robots of the future.

“Our effort now is to minimize the discomfort they cause humans,” said Kang Sang-chul, an executive at Naver Labs, a subsidiary that develops the robots.

Yeo Jiwon, who works on the company’s social impact team, recently ordered a coffee on Naver’s internal app. Minutes later, the “Rookie” exited the elevator on the 23rd floor, walked through the security gates and approached his desk. When it got close, the robot opened its storage compartment with a cup of iced coffee that had been brewed at a Starbucks on the second floor.

Robots aren’t always perfect, Yeo said. Sometimes they move slower than expected or occasionally stop too far from where she is sitting.

“Sometimes they feel like a beta release,” she said, using technical jargon for software still in development. But deliveries save her time and help her focus on work, eliminating the distraction of walking to a coffee shop, she said.

Tech companies often encourage employees to test their own products, but with its robots Naver has turned the entire office into a research and development lab, putting employees as test subjects for future technologies in the workplace.

When Naver employees drive to the office, which ended construction this year, the company automatically sends reminders of where they parked in the workplace app. Employees pass through security gates that use facial recognition, even when masked to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. At Naver’s internal health clinic, artificial intelligence software suggests areas of focus for employees’ annual health checkup.

Then there are the robots.

Naver designed the office from the ground up with robots in mind, starting construction in 2016. All doors are programmed to open when a robot approaches. There are no tight hallways or floor obstructions. The roofs are marked with numbers and QR codes to help the machines find their way around. The cafeteria has dedicated lanes for robots to deliver meals.

As part of its research, Naver has also published studies in the field of human-robot interaction. After a series of experiments, for example, the company concluded that the ideal place for a robot in an elevator crowded with humans is the corner near the entrance, on the opposite side of the elevator buttons. Placing the robot at the bottom of the elevator made humans uncomfortable, the Naver researchers found.

The company’s engineers also designed animated eyes that look in the direction the robot is heading. They found that employees were better able to anticipate the robot’s movement if they could see its gaze.

None of the machines look human. Kang said the company didn’t want to give people the false impression that the robots would behave like humans. (Some robotics experts believe that humanoid robots make humans more, not less, uncomfortable.)

Naver isn’t the only tech company trying to make headway in the field of robots, of course. Rice Robotics has deployed hundreds of square, cartoonish robots that deliver packages, groceries and more in office buildings, malls and convenience stores across Asia. Robots like Optimus, the prototype that Tesla unveiled in September, are designed to be more human-like and carry boxes, water plants and more, but they are still a long way from being deployed.

Victor Lee, the CEO of Rice Robotics, said he was impressed when he saw videos of the machines and Naver’s robot-friendly building. While Rice’s delivery robots work differently, Naver’s approaches “make sense,” he said. “Naver obviously has a lot more development budget for these fantastic projects.”

Naver said a typical feature of its robots is that they are intentionally “brainless,” meaning they are not rolling computers that process information inside the machine. Instead, the robots communicate in real time over a high-speed private 5G network with a centralized “cloud” computing system. The robots’ movements are processed using data from cameras and sensors.

Each robot has several cameras that record images of its surroundings. There was some disagreement within Naver about what exactly the robots needed to know and how the collected data would be used. When the prototypes were being developed, engineers initially wanted the robots to register a wider field of view to assess their location more quickly and accurately, according to Lee Jin-kyu, director of data protection at Naver.

Lee feared this would result in data that could be used to track employees without their knowledge, creating legal problems for the company in South Korea, which has strict labor and privacy laws. Lee and the engineers agreed to only capture one frame per second from a front-facing camera and use the other cameras only if more images were needed.

The cameras can only see below people’s waists, and the images are erased as soon as the robot orients itself. An emergency mode kicks in if a robot is knocked over or camera angles suddenly change. In these cases, the robot announces that it can record people’s faces.

Despite Naver’s precautions, privacy experts worry that potential customers could modify the bots or create their own policies about how they collect data. Kim Borami, a privacy lawyer in Seoul, said that many South Korean companies are opaque about their data policies and that she has found examples of companies violating privacy laws.

She also noted that it was impossible to know for sure whether Naver was following its own privacy policies without taking a closer look at its software — which Naver does not share publicly.

“You don’t usually find out about privacy violations at a company until there’s a whistleblower or a leak,” Kim said.

Naver said it complied with South Korean laws on privacy and surveillance of employee data. But part of the challenge with new technology in the workplace is creating rules on the fly.

“There’s no reference for the kinds of privacy policies we need,” said Lee, the Naver engineer. “We had to start from scratch. That was the hardest part.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves.