Collecting your passport and IC takes just 5 minutes with ICA’s new robots

Ms Aruna said: “It could be quite frustrating because they would not be able to have a sense of their schedule for the day.”

ICA officers had to manually transfer and store passports and identification cards after they were produced.

When someone came to collect their documents, officers had to search the storage area to retrieve them, like sifting through a library.

Deputy Superintendent (DSP) Gerald Woo, senior manager of digital capability development at ICA’s policy and development division, said this was one of the major pain points for officers.

“It could be quite difficult to locate these documents among the many documents in the room,” he said.

In 2019, ICA started planning ways to solve these problems through the iSMART system.

DSP Woo’s team, Ms Aruna’s team, the Home Team Science and Technology Agency, and an external vendor took about five years to design and develop the final solution. This included a two-month pilot phase with members of the public to gather their feedback.

To use the self-collection kiosks at ISC, customers need to make an appointment in advance. They can arrive at any time on the scheduled date.

After customers verify their identities at the kiosk, a robot is dispatched to retrieve their documents.

The robots zoom across a room with 23 storage shelves, each storing up to 1,000 identification cards and 2,000 passports.

The floor is lined with radio frequency identification-enabled, or RFID-enabled, mats that guide the robots to shelves with specific documents. RFID uses radio waves to identify objects.

A robotic arm at the shelf takes the documents and deposits them in the robot, which ferries them back to the kiosk.

Customers have to bring along their old identification documents and insert them into the kiosk, which punches holes to invalidate them.

ICA officers are present to guide users through the process.

ICA said that before iSMART, it would have taken 20 officers to serve the same number of customers at once.

Now, it takes only five officers to oversee 20 kiosks.

On top of the robots that move between storage and kiosks, larger robots that can hold up to 10 passports and 10 identification cards at a time have taken over the job of delivering new documents from the production area to the storage room. They sort the documents and pick out those bound for collection at post offices.

Ms Aruna said members of the public have commented on how fast the self-collection process is.

She added that officers appreciate not having to do manual and repetitive tasks, which allows them to try other job functions, such as conducting interviews for passport and NRIC applications.

DSP Woo said: “Witnessing the tangible and positive impact of the team’s hard work actually makes all the effort that we have done worthwhile.”