As the world continues to fight the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, robots and automation are playing a critical role in helping to safeguard people and process the supplies that humans need as they shift to remote working.
Let’s see 6 sectors in which robots are helping during COVID-19:
Healthcare
Self-driving robots are helping disinfect hospitals limiting the spread of coronaviruse without exposing hospital staff to the risk of infection.
The robots are used also as healthcare assistance performing several essential tasks such as: flagging patients at the entrance to the field hospital who displayed fever symptoms, monitoring heart rates and blood oxygen levels, delivering medication and led exercise routines for sick patients.
Pharmaceutical assistance
While pharmaceutical companies continue to work on a vaccine or treatments for the virus, robotics companies have been at the forefront of providing companies with automated solutions to help speed up manual and repetitious tasks in this space for years. Robots were created to help facilitate rapid, high-throughput diagnostic and research-based testing of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the novel COVID-19.
Unmanned delivery vehicles
Autonomous deliveries are bringing supplies to people as they adopt social distancing, with engineers driving the vehicles remotely through the cloud.
Teleworking robots
With millions of people now working at home due to lockdowns, the usage of video and audio conferencing tools has skyrocketed as companies like Zoom, Microsoft (Skype), Google Hangout and others provide virtual meeting tools. While a Zoom or Google Hangout might replace the weekly budget meeting, the use of telepresence robots can be used for different scenarios where an attendee needs to move around a location, such as an event planner virtually visiting a hotel’s conference space, or being able to provide telepresence to an event attendee who cannot make it to the event (whether it’s a large business conference or even a small wedding reception).
At the same time, robots were created to provide family members with the opportunity to speak with patients and elderly residents via video due to “no visitors” policies and lockdowns at these locations.
Education
Facially expressive robots and avatars that run on a cloud-based learning platform that integrates social emotional skills with science, technology, engineering, and math were created to help kids with their education.
Food preparation for restaurants
Several companies have developed robots that aid in food preparation, such as Miso Robotics (hamburger grilling and deep frying), CafeX (coffee and other drinks), and Picnic (pizza preparation).
While some food robotics companies have struggled with their concepts before the coronavirus outbreak, the glut of restaurants that have been forced to provide take-out or delivery-only services may give them a second look at some of these automation systems.
As the world continues to stop the COVID-19 outbreak, it has become clear that humans and robots need to work together, as these automation technologies help keeping humans safe, producing products people need and developing new medicine and treatments.
Robots help humans cope with this global pandemic.
