Rosie the Robot. Ask most millennials who or what that is and they may come up with a DJ, a character in the new Blade Runner movie or even the next dance craze. For Micah Green, the 21-year-old founder, president and CEO of Maidbot, Rosie refers to the robot in the cartoon The Jetsons, and it was his choice for the name of the robot that soon will be cleaning up hotel rooms and public spaces throughout the world.
“Right now in the hospitality industry, I think the biggest uses for robots are areas where there is a labor shortage,” said Green, who recently made Forbes’ “30 under 30” list for 2018. “I was talking to somebody recently who said it’s not a labor shortage anymore, it’s a labor crisis—and that’s all around the world. Because of that, it makes a lot of sense to tackle hospitality first. A big part of it is the injuries and the fact that because people are getting injured, they start shifting into food service and other areas outside of the hotel space. One big thing about robotics is instead of looking at it from the replacement perspective, it’s filling in gaps.”
For now, Rosie is capable of cleaning floors in rooms and public spaces, but Green expects that “folding laundry and making beds are not way out there.”
The idea of a cleaning robot came to Green while he was a student at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration; he dropped out after a year in an accelerated program. He was taking a class in hotel operations, and was assigned to work a shift as a room attendant in one of the properties on campus.
“It opened my eyes big time to how things were done,” he said. “It was the same, super-stagnant for decades, and that was just kind of crazy to me. Although it was supposed to be an eight-hour shift, I kept working as a room attendant for a few months. I started literally taking notes with a notepad, interviewing room attendants and management, and just observing. Because of that, I was exposed to some of the key issues.”
For Green, Maidbot is the first step of his vision of an ecosystem of robots. “We also incorporated a company called Xbot,” he noted. “X is the variable, and Maid is the first variable within Xbot. There are a lot of opportunities outside of cleaning, such as food service.”