KLM - Spencer

KLM - Spencer

KLM’s home hub, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, is one of the largest and busiest in Europe – and the majority of its traffic comes from connecting passengers. Helping these passengers get quickly through various security zones and to their next flight is paramount to the success of both the airport and airlines, like KLM, that use it.

Taking this challenge seriously and looking for sustainable flow management solutions, KLM and a consortium of international research partners (funded by the European Union) are on a mission to find out if a smart robot named SPENCER could be part of the answer.

Following three years of careful development, SPENCER was recently put to work Schiphol airport, where he completed testing with tasks like scanning boarding passes and guiding KLM passengers to their gate. Now, the consortium partners will use real passenger feedback to improve SPENCER going forward.

From a purely marketing perspective, the cute and helpful robot (decked out in KLM blue) can’t help but turn heads. People are inherently drawn to fascinating technology and it doesn’t get much more fascinating than a fully autonomous robot navigating his way through a busy airport. By getting involved in robotics, KLM also shows itself to be on the leading edge of technology.

SPENCER has been the subject of reports by countless news outlets, and this video released March 30 by KLM (with more than 15,000 views on YouTube and over 800,000 on Facebook) shows just how much love he gets from curious and camera-happy travellers.