A theme park near Nagasaki in southern Japan will open a smart hotel, Hen-na Hotel, featuring female androids that greet guests, and robots that carry luggage and serve coffee. Henn-na Hotel, meaning "Strange Hotel" in English, will feature three uniformed reception androids, four service and porter robots, an industrial robot arm serving as a cloak room attendant and several cleaning robots. Androids with strong visual human-likeness are referred to as actroids. The receptionists will be sourced from Kokoro, a group company of Hello Kitty licensing company Sanrio that is known for its lifelike Actroid androids. The hotel will also have machines from Aldebaran Robotics, which makes the Nao humanoid robot as well as mobile carrier SoftBank's Pepper humanoid robot, and Yaskawa Electric's industrial robots. The facility is scheduled to open in July, 2015 with 72 guest rooms. A second phase will open in 2016 with another 72 rooms.
Henn-na Hotel at the Dutch-inspired Huis Ten Bosch theme park will be partly powered by solar panels and guests will have the option of using facial-recognition software instead of door keys. "We'd like to draw visitors to this setting surrounded by nature by establishing a smart hotel, which could be something we could spread through Japan and the world," the spokeswoman for Huis Ten Bosch said.
