I'm excited about the idea of an entire condo building being constructed in a somewhat similar way. I'd love to live in a building where the HOA meetings were people presenting new ways we could live without having to ever wash dishes again.
Or just a robot arm with arbitrary dish-type manipulator to load & unload your dishwasher. Then it can take my usual pile-of-stuff on the countertop, and restack it nice and clean an hour later. Bonus if it can reach into my cupboards :)
I know this is off-topic, but ascribing a country as the "doer" for this sort of story frustrates me a lot.
I'm sure people would be up in arms if "America builds Creationist museum" was a headline, so why should we do this for other places? It's not even hard to rewrite! "First hotel entirely operated by robots to open in Japan"
because it's not America as whole who got together to do it, it's a couple people who live in the country who do it. At least that's how I see it.
"America rejects Bush, elects Clinton" makes sense because it's talking about something the country as a whole did. But saying "America builds the creationist museum" can be read as "this was built with a non-minimal amount of popular support, is representative of how americans see things as a whole, and should be placed on the index card describing the country and its people"
Every news-item in every newspaper published starts off with 'City,' for national news and 'City, Country' for international news. That's so customary I highly doubt readers would interpret it as the whole country being complicit, it's just a geographic label, not a stand-in for the population.
This sort of construct is well-established in English. When the headline reads "America Walks on Moon", the metonymic expansion is understood to be "[at least one person from] America Walks on Moon".
In this case, I need no additional context to interpret the headline as the hotel being built somewhere within the geographical region called Japan.
The reception desk robot reaching to get keys is bizarre, surely all door locks would be keyless (access via an app for example) and any other information could be provided digitally.
Yeah, fully staffless check-in/out is already pretty common in Europe, and doesn't require anything as movie-like as robots grabbing keys off a rack. When you book you're given a code, and you use it to retrieve your key or keycard from a vending-machine-like box at the entrance. Then you drop it off when you leave. This is one chain that does that in Finland, and has no staff on premises most of the time (only cleaning staff come in for a few hours in the middle of the day): http://www.omenahotels.com/about-us/
The aforementioned Yotel in New York also has check-in machine at the entrance. (There's a check-in desk upstairs in the lobby but you don't routinely have to use it.) The business traveler chains in the US are also starting to focus more on check-in kiosks.
I don't believe it. It is not yet possible make something as simple as a robot to make your bed or a robot to do the maintenance or the other robots and herself.
It's not all robotic. It's mostly robotic. It will be interesting to see how this works out. Except for handling linens, most hotel jobs could be automated in a hotel designed for that.
It's time for someone to build an effective institutional bathroom cleaning robot. Even if you have to design a robot-compatible bathroom.
I always thought that having a self cleaning bathroom would be better. Think something like a car-wash. Combine key activation with motion sensors, and I'd think it would be a great idea.
I think the handling linens issue goes away when you rethink the bed, linens and machinery as a whole.
What if the sheets were more of a pillow case style and the bed changed itself. Perhaps some machinery would lift the mattress, and the sheets could be slipped off and back on again by some arms within the bed frame. Those linens could then be dispensed through internal chutes into a laundry room.
Someone further up this discussion thread said it really well, they suggested that we should think of the hotel as a complete machine, rather than machines operating inside a hotel.
I have seen a competition in Japan where the robot can recognize successfully what kind of drink is requested and bring it to guest . I feel optimistic about this concept.
We're about 10-15 years (at least) from the point at which room cleaning can be done robotically. It's actually an incredibly complex task, which requires a lot more in terms of executive skills/dexterity that just aren't on the near-term roadmap for robotics or their control systems.
Even doing something simple, and highly constrained like changing the linens on the bed, is still 5 years out (at least).
Now, what they might have done, is constrain the environment, such that the tasks can all be automated. I.E. designing the bed/linens, restricting what/where things can be left in the room, or alternatively, restricting what types of cleanup work will be done.
That would be an interesting approach, but far from the much more challenging task of creating a generalized robotic solution to hotel automation.
You can guesstimate these things a bit by the Kurzweil type technique of projecting Moore's laws type improvements in computation and comparing them to animal neural systems as in one of his graphs:
My timeframes are all minimum numbers - I.E. the dates by which I would give you 10 to 1 odds that they won't be beat. I don't have any insight into the maximum time frames - but anybody who spends a lot of time watching the growth curve in robotics would agree that we aren't advancing very quickly in optical/visual feedback dexterity See: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/fingertip-sensor-gives-robot-... for what is considered to be state of the art.
The dates regarding generalized cleaning, come from having done a n analysis of the higher-level thinking that takes place when cleaning a room - its very, very impressive the level of analysis that needs to take place for anything but the most straightforward cleanup job.
What's interesting of course, is that anybody can make pretty good predictions as to what dates won't be beat, but it's hard to guess when they will be. Whats awesome to think about, is once we have technology to do things like clean up a room, the vast majority of other robotic tasks, are going to fall very quickly.
Oh dear. I now have images, thanks to numerous police/murder TV series, of a robot finding a dead person on the bed, carefully folding them up to stick in the waste chute, replacing the bloodied linen with clean linen, and going on it's merry way with no-one the wiser...
To align with the current guest service model, the robot would need to have a use case for "guest sleeping in bed during room-cleaning hours without a 'do not disturb' indicator".
Depending on how smart that solution is, the story might just turn into "mummified hotel guest evicted after 2 year stay; was discovered only when credit card expired."
"Constraining the environment" is a perfectly valid approach, IMO. At least it is if your question is 'how do I automate a hotel.'
The idea of human-like robots performing tasks in human-like ways is (again, IMO) an analogy that makes it easy for people in the 1950s to imagine the 2050s. How will check in work? Robots working the front desk. Cleaning? Robot maids. It's a placeholder for technology that doesn't exist yet but is ultimately expected to to some job.
To update the analogy now that we're closer to achieving the reality, lets imagine a hotel that is a machine Instead of a hotel staffed by machines. In that context, specialized beds, sheets, buildings, and other adaptions to the practicalities of machine abilities are fine. After all, our regular hotels were built specifically to be convenient for human workers changing sheets or delivering room service.
I think that's ultimately how a lot of technology will progress, as part of a complex of people and machines. Self driving cars need to work on "human roads" because these are the roads that exist. But, I think adaption will go all ways if the tech succeeds. Roads will be built or updated to be more suitable for self driving cars. Humans will adapt too.
That's a great analogy - the robot maid is a placeholder for expected automation, but the form is not known yet. I hadn't thought about it like that.
I often tell people I have a house full of robots. I have a robotic clothes washer and a robotic dish washer. I also have a robotic vacuum cleaner. All are specialized tasks, automated, but for whatever reason only the vacuum is usually called a robot.
Some of the things they have look like robots as most people imagine them. An arm spray painting cars. But in most cases its a gradual process of using less human resources and more machinery. Futurists call it robots. Engineers call it automation. Managers call it efficiency. Economists call it capital. Everyone chooses the abstraction that works for whatever it is they are trying to solve.
The point is, sheets must be freshened. If factories are the reference point, I think it shows that marginal automation is harder which makes sense considering that we start from the easiest. Today's factories use far fewer people per unit of output, but few are 100% machine. People still work in factories.
Fully automated hotels sounds like a really cool tech project or PR project, maybe an idea lab. But for actual wide adoption, I would guess the best chance is the kind of engineering that turned 1000 person factories into 100 person factories. Some of it may be pretty low tech.
Anyway.. how about a sheet dispenser in the headboard so that sheets can be pulled on to the bed in one smooth motion? I might get one for home if they come in cheap enough. I'll be ready if they invent robot girlfriends.
Heck your wall thermostat is a robot. Its the textbook example of the definition of a robot - an automated machine that makes decisions for you and takes action on your behalf.
Yes - I am 95%+ confident that we will not have a generalized robotic cleaning system capable of doing what your average human hotel room cleaner can do today. I've been closely watching advances in robotics for 10+ years, as well as AGI advances. Neither of them have demonstrated any trends which would suggest that hotel room cleaning is even remotely possible in 10, or even 15 years.
In comparison, the predictions that I would have made about computing systems in 1995 about 2015, would have been almost bang on, with the exception that online teaching never really took off the way I thought it might, and libraries are still buying lots and lots of books.
I meam, it's already been done in the industrial area. Factories are mostly packaged around machines. There is still a human component but that decreases per iteration. The real challenge is to make the automation as safe and non-obstrusive as possible. Since humans tend to err on the wrong side of the average intelligence scale. This calls for an approach that requires changing everything that has been done up until now. A self cleaning bed is no longer a frame with a mattress and some sheets. It is now a sophisticated machine that is able to move itself in an algorithmic manner to achieve a defined goal. Think about it
Beds are simple technology. Thisn would turn them into something as complex as an elevator.
If we move away from engineering for humans to machines, all of this will be more feasible. Problem is that it will take decades before that happens. Even if the singularity even happens because smart machines cannot overcome human stupidity and greed.
Saying that robots are about to overtake people in most jobs is like saying that humanity has evolved to a point where it doesn't mind losing money or changing it's ways.
Seems to me the future has always been 15 years away, yet usually fails to materalize.
These problems that are being solved are non-trivial. We don't really have the computer vision, the robot dexterity, the high capacity batteries, the fuzzy logic, etc to make this work. We dont have it today and we probably won't have it anytime soon. Heck, we don't even have a useful home robot yet! Where's the Apple //e or Commodore 64 of robots?
If anything makes sense, its to build an automated hotel from scratch, not try to shoehorn in solutions. Self-cleaning toilets, self-making beds, roomba-like devices, etc so that a majority of the housekeeping work is done. In other words make your problem fit the limits of technology and don't be afraid to break from tradition. We didn't build robotic horses in the early 20th century. We built cars with four wheels and we paved down expensive roads to drive them on. Dirt roads passable for horse and buggy were a non-starter for cars. We all just ate up that expense for the convenience of owning a car.
The problem here is that housekeeping labor is dirt cheap and robots are crazy expensive. What's the incentive here to do these things? If there's an industry that's dying for cost savings, it won't be the hotel industry. Now look at, say, unionized auto manufacturers or unionized public sector workers. Lots of trivial easy to automate jobs there. Why aren't city buses driving themselves? Or drones writing parking tickets? Or robots laying down asphalt? Or robots walking a beat? Or teaching a class? That's where I could see some advancement. A lot of municipalities are looking at their retiring baby boomer workforces who negotiated very generous pensions via a corrupt political process and now don't want to fall into that trap again.
Every year something operated mainly by robots opens in Japan. After initial news there is no more follow up about it.
This sounds more like a marketing trick than real thing.
For those who doubt this statement or find it odd, I can offer an explanation.
First of all, tipping someone implicitly puts them in a servile position and says you're off better than them. Secondly, and this is probably the killer, it says that you don't think they would manage without your help.
Which just goes to show that everywhere you go, you learn something new which can be different ;)
I've tipped taxi drivers in Tokyo before and they're pretty appreciative, so maybe they just got used to foreign tourists tipping them and put up with it.
I don't know. Before I was made aware of this, I tried tipping while in Japan. Several places people were very dismissive about it. Eventually I just stopped, because it seemed like people didn't want tips.
It's correct to say that in Japan one should not tip. It's not correct to say that it's considered offensive.
To seriously offend some Japanese people you'll have to do something crazy like stick your chopsticks straight up in your rice bowl. Then you'll see them really wince ;-)
People in Japan know that Americans do tip and they will not be so surprised. Specially if you look like a "gaijin" tourist.
Some will even consider it fun to be tipped for first time in their life, others will find it offensive and will think that you are looking down to them. But, in any case, tipping is a faux pas in Japan.
I live in Japan and my wife is Japanese. Also, I had this conversation with several Japanese people.
I can tell you that most Japanese I know hate the concept of tipping and it makes them uncomfortable. They also hate giving tips. Not because of the money, but because they think that tipping is a way of looking down the other person.
Of course, when I say offensive I don't mean that they will curse and hate you forever. But probably some will think: "I already have a salary, I don't need you give me your coins".
If there's an scale of socially awkward situations, I guess tipping would be slightly under asking ketchup for your sashimi. But definitely not as bad as going into someone's house with your shoes on.
Looking at a few sites this morning, it sounds like it's typical to round up to the next Euro in Germany, and that tipping more than 10% might be seen as offensive (unless of course you are hoping to get some extra from an American).
I could never convince my US colleagues that you don't have to tip taxi drivers in Singapore 20%. They were actually incapable of not tipping, so ingrained was the habit in the US.
It's good knowledge to have before going to Japan, but encountering a Japanese person who would actually be offended if you were to offer a tip would be quite rare, I think. They're well aware tipping exists in other cultures. And they don't expect you to know the Japanese way of doing things. It could be interesting to see how they react if a Japanese person were to attempt it though. :)
Also, you could say a form of tipping does exist in Japan (kokorozuke), though it's quite different than what we usually think of tipping. The biggest differences being:
1. It's sort of a way of saying, "Sorry for the trouble" rather than "rating" their service.
2. You give the "tip" beforehand rather than afterwards. And it's likely you'll have to insist that they take it.
You can see this custom in high-end ryokans for example, but even then, it's not required or anything.
> "First of all, tipping someone implicitly puts them in a servile position and says you're off better than them. Secondly, and this is probably the killer, it says that you don't think they would manage without your help."
How do you come to this conclusion? When I tip someone I express my gratitude for the good service to the specific employee of some company that did a great job.
I never thought of it as the person receiving a tip is below me or anything like that and I doubt that this is how most people think about it.
It might be true that people in Japan feel this way about tipping, but your statement was very general as if it is an observation about the very nature of tipping itself.
That was traditionally the view in parts of Europe as well, although nowadays many people will be happy to accept a tip, especially since there are so many foreign tourists willing to offer one. Some people used to perceive it as an implication that you were in need of charity, i.e. that the reason you'd offer a tip to a waiter but not to an architect for rendering good service is that you didn't respect the waiter as a professional in the same sense that you respected the architect.
Sometimes it's contextual, e.g. in Greece the traditional norms were that tipping young people working at a restaurant as employees was fine, but tipping an owner-operator of a family-run restaurant could offend them, being taken as an implication that you thought they couldn't manage as an independent businessman, and needed a gift. Instead if you particularly liked their service, the socially acceptable way to show it was to either order more things, or return for another meal later; that way you gave them more money but in the form of more business, rather than an outright gift. (Nowadays this is only really an issue if you're Greek, especially a Greek from the same town, where tips, especially large ones, might be taken as having some kind of odd social implication. If you're a foreigner, tips aren't going to offend anyone, and are perceived basically the way North Americans would expect, as a thank-you for particularly good service.)
> How do you come to this conclusion? When I tip someone I express my gratitude for the good service to the specific employee of some company that did a great job.
Maybe so, but presumably you don't tip your doctor regardless of how well they do their job.
I don't tip a doctor with money (because it is strictly forbidden in Austria), but it's not unusual to give him a small gift (fine chocolate and similar things) and I would definitely do that after an operation if I had one.
It's also unnecessary -- many Japanese establishments include a service fee in the bill.
Conventions appear to be changing in some countries: I've seen restaurants and stands in Australia, well-known as a country where tipping is not done, put out tip cups with signs encouraging patrons to tip.
I haven't seen that (in my 2+ years living here). Recently though I've noticed a lot of stores showing 2 prices, one with tax and one without, but when I first moved here almost every store I went to only showed the price with tax included. I think the recent change is due to the sales tax increase.
Some love hotels in Tokyo already make sure you do not see a single human face in your stay. Room selection is done on a touch screen, door is opened with a code, and payment is done using a machine.
It feels like this hotel is just the next step as (as a few mentioned in this thread) tasks like changing & cleaning sheets are probably still handled by humans, albeit hidden.
Sounds interesting, but for me, I think I would still prefer a more 'human' environment for hotel - robots might be highly efficient on some tasks, but they will never able to replace the 'human' part, which I thoroughly enjoy when I travel.
Humans make great bartenders, great phone support, great teachers. But when I'm in my room, typing away or something, the last thing I want is a stranger coming in to change the towels or whatever. Keep a human in the front lobby, I'll take the robotic maids any day, please.
So under what circumstances are the human maids better? If you miss them because you're at the conference, then you don't care whether they're human, robot, or some sort of arsenic-based life-form as long as the room is cleaned. If it's casual smalltalk you want, a hotel maid isn't a very efficient way to deliver that.
Well, the bagage robot in the picture looks a lot like the one at Yotel in NYC: http://www.yotel.com/Hotels/New-York-City
It broke last time I visited, but fun to watch when it's operational.
It says if you stay between 2 and 5 nights there is a fee to have your bed made (#43). I wonder if this implies a human will be doing it.
I don't see anything on there that mentions robots making the beds. Could just be that the robots do most of the cleaning and humans change the sheets or something.
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[ 7.1 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadI'm excited about the idea of an entire condo building being constructed in a somewhat similar way. I'd love to live in a building where the HOA meetings were people presenting new ways we could live without having to ever wash dishes again.
I'm sure people would be up in arms if "America builds Creationist museum" was a headline, so why should we do this for other places? It's not even hard to rewrite! "First hotel entirely operated by robots to open in Japan"
Why would they be up in arms, it's a solid fact:
http://www.creationevidence.org/
"America rejects Bush, elects Clinton" makes sense because it's talking about something the country as a whole did. But saying "America builds the creationist museum" can be read as "this was built with a non-minimal amount of popular support, is representative of how americans see things as a whole, and should be placed on the index card describing the country and its people"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
This sort of construct is well-established in English. When the headline reads "America Walks on Moon", the metonymic expansion is understood to be "[at least one person from] America Walks on Moon".
In this case, I need no additional context to interpret the headline as the hotel being built somewhere within the geographical region called Japan.
* = Pictures/renderings on their homepage: http://www.h-n-h.jp/en/
Sure it is, as long as you don't refuse to consider the idea that you can adapt the bed to the robots.
It's time for someone to build an effective institutional bathroom cleaning robot. Even if you have to design a robot-compatible bathroom.
Not sure if the levels of cleanliness it gets to are up to hotel standards, though; people's standards for a public toilet are much lower.
What if the sheets were more of a pillow case style and the bed changed itself. Perhaps some machinery would lift the mattress, and the sheets could be slipped off and back on again by some arms within the bed frame. Those linens could then be dispensed through internal chutes into a laundry room.
Someone further up this discussion thread said it really well, they suggested that we should think of the hotel as a complete machine, rather than machines operating inside a hotel.
Even doing something simple, and highly constrained like changing the linens on the bed, is still 5 years out (at least).
Now, what they might have done, is constrain the environment, such that the tasks can all be automated. I.E. designing the bed/linens, restricting what/where things can be left in the room, or alternatively, restricting what types of cleanup work will be done.
That would be an interesting approach, but far from the much more challenging task of creating a generalized robotic solution to hotel automation.
http://cdn.singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/exp...
The dates regarding generalized cleaning, come from having done a n analysis of the higher-level thinking that takes place when cleaning a room - its very, very impressive the level of analysis that needs to take place for anything but the most straightforward cleanup job.
What's interesting of course, is that anybody can make pretty good predictions as to what dates won't be beat, but it's hard to guess when they will be. Whats awesome to think about, is once we have technology to do things like clean up a room, the vast majority of other robotic tasks, are going to fall very quickly.
Then I'm imagining the robots would slowly develop more semi-autonomy.
The challenge is to have the right VR on the other end so that the robot can be controlled intuitively.
Depending on how smart that solution is, the story might just turn into "mummified hotel guest evicted after 2 year stay; was discovered only when credit card expired."
The idea of human-like robots performing tasks in human-like ways is (again, IMO) an analogy that makes it easy for people in the 1950s to imagine the 2050s. How will check in work? Robots working the front desk. Cleaning? Robot maids. It's a placeholder for technology that doesn't exist yet but is ultimately expected to to some job.
To update the analogy now that we're closer to achieving the reality, lets imagine a hotel that is a machine Instead of a hotel staffed by machines. In that context, specialized beds, sheets, buildings, and other adaptions to the practicalities of machine abilities are fine. After all, our regular hotels were built specifically to be convenient for human workers changing sheets or delivering room service.
I think that's ultimately how a lot of technology will progress, as part of a complex of people and machines. Self driving cars need to work on "human roads" because these are the roads that exist. But, I think adaption will go all ways if the tech succeeds. Roads will be built or updated to be more suitable for self driving cars. Humans will adapt too.
I often tell people I have a house full of robots. I have a robotic clothes washer and a robotic dish washer. I also have a robotic vacuum cleaner. All are specialized tasks, automated, but for whatever reason only the vacuum is usually called a robot.
Some of the things they have look like robots as most people imagine them. An arm spray painting cars. But in most cases its a gradual process of using less human resources and more machinery. Futurists call it robots. Engineers call it automation. Managers call it efficiency. Economists call it capital. Everyone chooses the abstraction that works for whatever it is they are trying to solve.
The point is, sheets must be freshened. If factories are the reference point, I think it shows that marginal automation is harder which makes sense considering that we start from the easiest. Today's factories use far fewer people per unit of output, but few are 100% machine. People still work in factories.
Fully automated hotels sounds like a really cool tech project or PR project, maybe an idea lab. But for actual wide adoption, I would guess the best chance is the kind of engineering that turned 1000 person factories into 100 person factories. Some of it may be pretty low tech.
Anyway.. how about a sheet dispenser in the headboard so that sheets can be pulled on to the bed in one smooth motion? I might get one for home if they come in cheap enough. I'll be ready if they invent robot girlfriends.
We can't even get toilet seat cleaning right (filth warning):
http://i.imgur.com/USTbZRl.gif
In comparison, the predictions that I would have made about computing systems in 1995 about 2015, would have been almost bang on, with the exception that online teaching never really took off the way I thought it might, and libraries are still buying lots and lots of books.
If we move away from engineering for humans to machines, all of this will be more feasible. Problem is that it will take decades before that happens. Even if the singularity even happens because smart machines cannot overcome human stupidity and greed.
Saying that robots are about to overtake people in most jobs is like saying that humanity has evolved to a point where it doesn't mind losing money or changing it's ways.
These problems that are being solved are non-trivial. We don't really have the computer vision, the robot dexterity, the high capacity batteries, the fuzzy logic, etc to make this work. We dont have it today and we probably won't have it anytime soon. Heck, we don't even have a useful home robot yet! Where's the Apple //e or Commodore 64 of robots?
If anything makes sense, its to build an automated hotel from scratch, not try to shoehorn in solutions. Self-cleaning toilets, self-making beds, roomba-like devices, etc so that a majority of the housekeeping work is done. In other words make your problem fit the limits of technology and don't be afraid to break from tradition. We didn't build robotic horses in the early 20th century. We built cars with four wheels and we paved down expensive roads to drive them on. Dirt roads passable for horse and buggy were a non-starter for cars. We all just ate up that expense for the convenience of owning a car.
The problem here is that housekeeping labor is dirt cheap and robots are crazy expensive. What's the incentive here to do these things? If there's an industry that's dying for cost savings, it won't be the hotel industry. Now look at, say, unionized auto manufacturers or unionized public sector workers. Lots of trivial easy to automate jobs there. Why aren't city buses driving themselves? Or drones writing parking tickets? Or robots laying down asphalt? Or robots walking a beat? Or teaching a class? That's where I could see some advancement. A lot of municipalities are looking at their retiring baby boomer workforces who negotiated very generous pensions via a corrupt political process and now don't want to fall into that trap again.
In Japan it is rude to tip, so this opening sentence is completely invalid.
First of all, tipping someone implicitly puts them in a servile position and says you're off better than them. Secondly, and this is probably the killer, it says that you don't think they would manage without your help.
Which just goes to show that everywhere you go, you learn something new which can be different ;)
To seriously offend some Japanese people you'll have to do something crazy like stick your chopsticks straight up in your rice bowl. Then you'll see them really wince ;-)
Some will even consider it fun to be tipped for first time in their life, others will find it offensive and will think that you are looking down to them. But, in any case, tipping is a faux pas in Japan.
"Do as the Romans do" is always the correct behavior, but in this case the potential for offense is entirely overblown.
I can tell you that most Japanese I know hate the concept of tipping and it makes them uncomfortable. They also hate giving tips. Not because of the money, but because they think that tipping is a way of looking down the other person.
Of course, when I say offensive I don't mean that they will curse and hate you forever. But probably some will think: "I already have a salary, I don't need you give me your coins".
If there's an scale of socially awkward situations, I guess tipping would be slightly under asking ketchup for your sashimi. But definitely not as bad as going into someone's house with your shoes on.
So, that was the one taxi ride in Germany I took and didn't tip. (It was not the first taxi ride in Germany.)
Also, you could say a form of tipping does exist in Japan (kokorozuke), though it's quite different than what we usually think of tipping. The biggest differences being: 1. It's sort of a way of saying, "Sorry for the trouble" rather than "rating" their service. 2. You give the "tip" beforehand rather than afterwards. And it's likely you'll have to insist that they take it.
You can see this custom in high-end ryokans for example, but even then, it's not required or anything.
How do you come to this conclusion? When I tip someone I express my gratitude for the good service to the specific employee of some company that did a great job.
I never thought of it as the person receiving a tip is below me or anything like that and I doubt that this is how most people think about it.
It might be true that people in Japan feel this way about tipping, but your statement was very general as if it is an observation about the very nature of tipping itself.
Sometimes it's contextual, e.g. in Greece the traditional norms were that tipping young people working at a restaurant as employees was fine, but tipping an owner-operator of a family-run restaurant could offend them, being taken as an implication that you thought they couldn't manage as an independent businessman, and needed a gift. Instead if you particularly liked their service, the socially acceptable way to show it was to either order more things, or return for another meal later; that way you gave them more money but in the form of more business, rather than an outright gift. (Nowadays this is only really an issue if you're Greek, especially a Greek from the same town, where tips, especially large ones, might be taken as having some kind of odd social implication. If you're a foreigner, tips aren't going to offend anyone, and are perceived basically the way North Americans would expect, as a thank-you for particularly good service.)
Maybe so, but presumably you don't tip your doctor regardless of how well they do their job.
Conventions appear to be changing in some countries: I've seen restaurants and stands in Australia, well-known as a country where tipping is not done, put out tip cups with signs encouraging patrons to tip.
It feels like this hotel is just the next step as (as a few mentioned in this thread) tasks like changing & cleaning sheets are probably still handled by humans, albeit hidden.
Great, I'll be outside taking pictures of guests and trying to impersonate them.
http://www.h-n-h.jp/faq.pdf
It says if you stay between 2 and 5 nights there is a fee to have your bed made (#43). I wonder if this implies a human will be doing it.
I don't see anything on there that mentions robots making the beds. Could just be that the robots do most of the cleaning and humans change the sheets or something.