A series of demo runs were held with the Robovie robot in the Universal Citywalk Osaka shopping centre earlier this week in Japan trying to see how good the droid is at helping out lost shoppers. Here’s how it works.

A series of cameras, laser range finders and RFID tag readers are scattered around the 1000sqft section of the shopping centre. Each of these things help scan humans and determine what one of 10 categories they fall into, one of which is “lost”. Once a person is ID’ed, Robovie goes up and provides directions to where they want to go.

You may think this robot is friendly, but just look into its soulless, human-hating mechanical eyes. [Pinktentacle via Robot Watch via Yomiuri via Nikkei]