The Winter Olympics’ first winner? Robots

A fleet of adorable bulbous robots has been deployed across the Olympic venues in Pyeongchang, South Korea, providing a range of services from offering gate information in the airport to translation, serving drinks, and more than a dozen other functions, according to Olympic organizers. But it’s the vacuum cleaners that have already won over journalists.

Roaming the halls of the Main Press Centre, the washing-machine-sized bots are constantly sucking up stray debris and unwittingly drawing the curious eyes—and affections—of the press. Is it their diminutive size? The rounded shell that’s like a stormtrooper version of R2D2? The single, unblinking eye?

Designed by LG, the vacuuming robots—officially named the LG HOM-BOT—were designed to navigate spaces on their own and calculate the areas that need to be cleaned most frequently. Then it stores those places in a database and finds the most optimal routes to hit all of them. LG began testing these vacuuming robots in South Korea’s Incheon Airport in July 2017 in anticipation of this year’s Winter Games, and now it’s time for them to shine.

Via: Global News, LG