If you've ever been in one of those long lines waiting to use the check-in kiosks and get rid of your bag, only to see another airline's machines almost empty half a terminal away, you'll want to meet KATE.
She? It? is a new automated kiosk that can handle all the usual chores—and also is able to sense where in the airport the traffic is piling up, and report there for duty. When it needs more boarding-pass paper or baggage tags, or runs low on power, it returns to base for more. Sort of like C3PO meets R2D2 meets the airlines.
SITA Labs, which developed it, showed the system off at last week's Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels last week. Company officials pointed out that in addition to the normal ebb and flow of airport lines, a fleet of KATEs could respond to weather delays that involve large numbers of re-bookings and so forth.
And KATE is 'family-friendly:' it can be paired with the company's LEO robot, which can take your bags, label them, and send them on the way to, hopefully, the same place you're going.
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