How Robots are Helping with COVID-19 and How They Can Do More in the Future

Abstract

This talk will describe how ground, aerial, and marine robots have been used to protect healthcare workers from unnecessary exposure, handle the surge in demand for clinical care, prevent infections, restore economic activity, and maintain individual quality of life during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The talk is based on an analysis of the publicly available Robotics For Infectious Diseases (R4ID) dataset of over 200 instances capturing how robots have been used in 33 countries. The uses span six sociotechnical work domains and 30 different use cases representing different missions, robot work envelopes, and human-robot interaction dyads. The dataset also provides a model of adoption of robotics technology for disasters. Adoption favors robots that maximize the suitability for established use cases while minimizing risk of malfunction, hidden workload costs, or unintended consequences as measured by the NASA Technical Readiness Assessment metrics. Regulations do not present a major barrier but availability, either in terms of inventory or prohibitively high costs, does. The model suggests that in order to be prepared for future events, roboticists should partner with responders now, investigate rapidly manufacturing complex, reliable robots, and conduct fundamental research on predicting and mitigating risk in extreme or novel environments.