SINGAPORE, Jan. 3 -- Collecting a passport or NRIC at the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority's (ICA) self collection kiosks now takes about five minutes, down from 11 minutes previously.

The faster process is powered by robots that move across storage shelves to retrieve documents and deliver them to kiosks, according to the Straits Times.

Deputy Superintendent Gerald Woo, senior manager of digital capability development at ICA's policy and development division, said manual retrieval had been one of the biggest challenges for officers.

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

ICA launched the Integrated Smart Document Management System (iSMART) in July 2025, deploying mo...