INTERNATIONAL: To demonstrate the power of 5G connectivity, edge computing, Spain's Telefonica has demonstrated a raft of innovative applications for this growing technology, including "the humanisation of vending machines”, a robot bartender at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

The robot, developed by Macco Robotics, uses Telefonica's 5G technology to prepare and serve juice, wine or cocktails to congress attendees. It can reply in several languages when greeting customers, respond to their orders and offer recommendations in the language that the customer has previously selected.

 The robot also uses facial recognition to remember and recognize people who come back to it; offering up drinks based on their previous order.

The hospitality robot, named Kime, using computer vision cameras to allow the quality of the prepared product to be controlled in real time.

Telefonica say the technology is scalable to serve people with more potential functionalities, always in real time, such as demographic characteristics of the users, capacity, waiting time in the queue, warnings for crowds or identifying specific peaks of high demand or supply needs, among others.

Telefonica has also demonstrated a 'Spot' robot using its 5G tech. The advanced robots like Spot and low-latency 5G make them a perfect tool to help humans in dangerous situations.

"His objective is to act in situations where people are putting their lives at risk ,'we better send a robot that assesses the situation', " a representative from Telefonica has said.

The organizers of MWC hope to attract about 50,000 attendees to the Spanish city making it one of the biggest physical events since the start of the pandemic. The event will run from February 28 to March 3.

^{PHOTO: 5G-CONNECTED ROBOT BARTENDER SERVING DRINKS / INTERVIEW WITH MERCEDES FERNÁNDEZ, MANAGER OF INNOVATION, NETWORK AND IT AT TELEFÓNICA / 5G-CONNECTED 'SPOT' ROBOT DOG BEING DEMONSTARTED / TELEFONICA BOOTH}