Covid-19 could accelerate the robot takeover of human jobs

Inside a Schnucks grocery store in St. Louis, Missouri, the toilet paper and baking ingredients are mostly cleared out. A rolling robot turns a corner and heads down an aisle stocked with salsa and taco shells. It comes up against a masked customer wearing shorts and sneakers; he’s pushing a shopping cart carrying bread.

The robot looks something like a tower speaker on top of an autonomous home vacuum cleaner—tall and thin, with orb-like screen eyes halfway up that shift left and right. A red sign on its long head makes the introductions. “Hi, I’m Tally! I check shelf inventory!” A moment of uncertainty ensues. Tally freezes, sensing the human, and the customer pauses, seeming unsure of what to do next. Should he maneuver around the robot? Or wait for it to move along on its own? After a few seconds, the customer chooses to divert, and heads down another aisle.

Tally carries on taking stock of Ritz crackers, tuna fish cans, and nutmeg. Customers—some wearing gloves, a few choosing to shop maskless—are unfazed by its presence.

What seemed a little strange to shoppers when Tally arrived a year ago is now, mid–pandemic, not even close to being the most unusual thing happening inside the store. The robot has become part of the backdrop, posing far less threat than other shoppers and arousing much less concern than more pressing topics such as personal safety, possible meat shortages, and when the next shipment of Clorox wipes might arrive.

Such machines are not just at grocery stores. Roboticists at Texas A&M University and the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue recently surveyed over 120 reports from around the world about how robots were being used during the covid-19 pandemic. They discovered them spraying disinfectants, walking dogs, and showing properties for real estate agents. But where they may be doing the most to save lives is in hospitals, helping with things like disinfection, patient intake, and delivery of supplies.

Life inside a covid-19 ward looks like this: tubes running through windows sucking out contaminated air, coronavirus patients lying inside “isopods” (plexiglass boxes placed over beds to prevent contamination), and nurses in goggles, caps, gloves, masks, and disposable gowns, cautiously administering medicine, providing care, and holding up iPads for family members not allowed in.

Here’s where Moxi steps in. So far, the health-care robot, which was already working at two hospitals in Texas before covid-19 hit, has been
delivering lab samples, intravenous pumps, medications, and protective gear during the pandemic. But it has not yet been put to work inside critical care, intensive care, or covid-19 units. The outbreak has compelled Moxi’s creators, Diligent Robots of Austin, Texas, to think about how it could help there too.

“If we can find ways for more dangerous activities to be automated, then we should.”

In May, Vivian Chu, one of the company’s founders, introduced me to her invention over a video call. Cloud-white, with a barrel-like torso, Moxi is a blend of cute and not too creepy. It has a camera on its moving head, which can turn, but not a neck-breaking 360 degrees, since that would feel weird to anyone watching. Its eyes are bursts of warm blue light—they can turn into softly glowing pink hearts at the right moment—and it rolls along on wheels, with a robotic arm that waves almost cheerfully to passersby. Moxi is very deliberately unimposing. As Chu, who is 5’4″ (163 cm), talked to me from her company’s lab, she stood a few inches taller than the robot next to her, although she did explain that it can adjust its height, growing taller if a task requires.

For the most part, Moxi acts like a mechanical waiter. Inside its body, it can carry a tray of “lock tubes” that hold medications or supplies placed there by medical workers. Moxi’s headband turns red if it is locked, green if unlocked.

Moxi does not carry on conversations but makes adorable “meeps” while working, said Chu: “Very R2-D2. Different noises to convey if the robot is happy that it successfully delivered or upset because it opened something incorrectly.”

The designers put a lot of thought into creating a robot that is personable, like a teammate, Chu explained. Not too human-like, “but at the same time not like a toaster in the corner that you don’t care about.”

Chu and her cofounder, Andrea Thomaz, are experts in social robots, and their long-term vision has been to help frontline health-care workers. They’d already spent two and a half years with nurses—shadowing them, interviewing them, and watching them interact with patients. They saw how many nurses were being forced to run errands like fetching supplies and medicine instead of spending their time on face-to-face patient care.

Thomaz remembers one nursing assistant in Austin who set down her cup of coffee at the beginning of her shift and never touched it again, because she was so busy. “We would shadow them for entire shifts, and you realize 12 hours is a very long time to be on your feet,” she said.

When some medical staff realized that Thomaz and Chu were designing robots for hospitals, their first reaction was one of suspicion. “Wait, you want to develop a robot to do our job?” Thomaz recalls being asked.

“The robot can’t be a nurse. It’s not going to be a nurse,” says Chu. “But what it’s perfect for is going in and helping relieve the nurse that is so overburdened.”

When covid-19 overwhelmed hospitals in the states of Washington, New York, and New Jersey, “it really felt like a rallying call,” says Thomaz. “Nurses have always been a part of our mission. We just looked at each other like ‘Wow, they really need help more than ever.’”

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