Flemish company to produce robot butlers
The makers of the humanoid care robot Zora have announced plans to branch out into robot butlers and expand their activities at a new site in Diepenbeek’s BioVille incubator
50 extra staff needed
The Limburg regional investment agency LRM has allocated extra financing to QBMT to speed up the company’s development. As a result, it is moving its headquarters from Ostend to Diepenbeek. QBMT will now be at BioVille, the incubator and accelerator for care and biotechnology at Hasselt University’s Diepenbeek campus, where it plans to hire extra staff to develop the software for Zora so it can be used for different purposes. So far, 63 Zora robots have been sold to rest homes, hospitals and schools.
“We envision our robot, which currently works only in the care sector, functioning in a domestic environment, too,” Fabrice Goffin, managing director of QBMT, said. “We are thinking of a sort of robot butler who keeps track of what you have in the fridge, for example.” New applications could also enable the robot to read out headlines from newspapers and give weather forecasts.
To introduce the new applications, QBMT plans its own production facility in Flanders. “We are currently programming the software for robots that are built in France, but we’re thinking of our own production facility in Limburg,” said Goffin. “In that case, we will need at least 50 extra employees.”
The robots have attracted much interest abroad, with QBMT receiving orders from clients in France, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland.
