This robot is totally Ace

A worker who will never need a sick day has arrived in Auckland Airport - a world-first robot that sorts and delivers duty free goods to travellers.

ACE - Automated Collection Experience - is a white crane-like robot installed at Aelia Duty Free.

Pre-paid duty free orders can be collected in 30 seconds by scanning a bar code outside the glass-fronted case ACE works in.

ACE's arm then swivels around to open the appropriate drawer in one of the three walls around it, before swivelling back to drop the order, all bagged up, into a drop box for the customer to collect.

"You can now order your duty free goods online and collect them automatically and in-style via ACE," Lagardere Travel Retail manager Ivo Favotto said. "It is completely digital. Our ACE is a world-first for travel retail and the first retail execution of a robot of this kind in New Zealand."

ACE can lift up to 150kg, which is good to know, should New Zealand's duty free alcohol limit ever expand from the current three bottles of spirits and six bottles of wine.

The helpful machine is 4m tall and so heavy the floor had to be restructured and strengthened for its installation.

ACE: How it worksPlace an order online at aeliadutyfree.co.nz. Any Auckland Airport order will be distributed by ACE. You can also make an order at Auckland duty free in departure as you leave New Zealand.

Keep your receipt. The receipt has a bar code that gets scanned by ACE, telling the machine which drawer your purchase is being stored in.

ACE picks up your purchase and delivers it into a collection drawer, already bagged up for you to take away.

The whole process takes less than 30 seconds.

Similar robots operate at Yotel in New York City and Shoebox in Berlin, but this is the first robot of its kind to operate in an airport.