This is the Eye’s big brother, Intellibot. This commercial cleaning machine can scrub as well as vacuum floors and is equally at home on carpet as hard floors. You’ll find Intellibots in operation at Changi Airport in Singapore, Sydney University in Australia and Mayo Clinic in the US.

It seems Domino’s will latch on to almost anything that offers an advantage in its highly competitive market. Lately they’ve been experimenting with delivery technology to replace those poor students that currently bring pizza to your door. The “personal delivery device” shown above was developed by Starship Technologies to bring piping hot pizza to customers within one kilometre of Domino's stores in Hamburg, Germany. Now the service is spreading throughout Europe. 

Another Domino’s innovation is the Domicopter, the drone seen here airlifting emergency supplies of pizza to a home in England.

The revolution is already well under way here, with 24/7 access to centres and machines that not only monitor your heartrate and performance level, but can actively put together a complete fitness programme for you. As a result, the new breed of fitness franchise – think Jetts, Anytime and Snap – have provided some of the best returns on investment around, although the market has become extremely competitive.

If robots can build a car, they can certainly build a burger or pizza, but I’m not sure about robot servers or that fellow leaning out of the drive-through window in the photo near the top of this page. McDonald’s may have ruled out replacing their customer-facing people with machines, but in a sense they already have – with those touch-screen kiosks you’re now confronted with before you reach the counter. They insist that the kiosks were conceived well before the minimum-wage protests in the United States, designed instead to make it easier for customers to customise their own burgers.

You’d think that this traditionally labour-intensive industry would be one of the last industries to feel the cold finger of robotics on its shoulder, but the machines have been taking over for years – in the form of factory-built framing and increasingly-elaborate measuring instruments and power tools. Watch out in the near future for 3D printing and robots used to lay bricks, drill, dig, paint, you name it.

Despite dire predictions of retailing’s doom, the industry is still with us, and smart retailers are combining their physical and online presences to create a new kind of customer experience that can’t be duplicated by a purely online store. Superstores such as Lowes and Bossa Nova are using robots to guide customers to the products they want and supermarkets are using self-service checkouts to shorten waiting times and optimise staff requirements.  

Article by Robin La Pere, No Ordinary Business and Franchise Consultants