Between November 2017 and August 2019, students from the School of Hospitality students were tasked to automate two tasks as part of the Hotel Innovation Challenge 2018: the transportation of dirty laundry from the hotel rooms to the collection point at the back-of-house, and the quantity check of fresh linen returned from the laundry vendor.

The solution that the students came up with? A deft incorporation of existing technologies such as RFID technology for linen inventory management and an autonomous mobile robot for the transportation into an integrated laundry management system that has helped to improve the hotels’ linen operations productivity.

To further enhance the hotels’ linen operations productivity, the students also worked to redesign the housekeeping cart to enable robotic docking, and added smart Internet of Things technologies to make it possible for the laundry vendor to pack linen directly into the hotel’s carts.