Face-scanning robots to compete with ticketing agents

In from Ify Chiemeziem…

Imagine showing up at an airport and instead of the usual ticket agents, you are accosted by shiny, white, plastic, mechanical machines which would scan your face and read your documents and even bestow you with a warm welcome. This could be the future of ticketing as robots that could do this went on display at this week’s Air Paris Show.

These robots are meant to save labour, each one doing the work of five human ticket agents. And in some countries where people are not too keen on how they are treated by agents at the airport, these robots could be preferred to the normal human interactions.

Thales, the French company that makes the robots, explains how the robots work. The machines are meant to share scans of passengers’ faces with other computers around the airport. Then it will print the passenger’s face on the boarding pass in an encrypted form. The gate agents then check the scan, confirming that the person the robot saw is in fact the person they are letting on the plane.

While at the show, the French Minister, Laurent Fabius, joked that, with the robot, Frenchmen could stand to be a little nicer to tourists.

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