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On a visit last year to Spartanburg Regional Hospital, in Spartanburg, S.C., I got to see a couple of robots in action.
There was a room-size pharmacy robot, really just a giant arm
mounted on a track that would zoom back and forth in an isle where
various medicines were stored picking out the ones required for a given
order, then dropping them in a bin for the pharmacy technicians to
double-check and then dispatch to wherever they were needed. The actual
delivery of the medicines and many other supplies was accomplished by
another robot, a motorized cabinet that rolled through the halls and
went up and down elevators, visiting each nursing station where the
medicines were needed.
In addition to cutting down on some manual labor, the system aimed to save lives by reducing medical errors.
Meanwhile, in Iraq and Afghanistan, robots are saving lives in other
ways. Of course, in the case of unmanned aerial vehicles like the
Predator, they're also taking lives in those missile strikes we hear so
much about along the Afghanistan / Pakistan border. They started out as
pure surveillance drones, but eventually it became too maddening for
their operators to spot a target of opportunity and let it slip away.
So now if a Predator pilot spots someone planting an improvised
explosive device, he has an opportunity to remotely launch a missile
and take that person out. There is still a "man in the loop" making the
decision about when to fire or not, so when there's a screwup where the
wrong target gets attacked, it's a human screwup. But when everything
works right, those attack UAVs are also saving the lives of our
soldiers and preventing pilots from having to risk their lives over
hostile territory.
The more clear-cut case where robots are saving lives is on the
ground, where unmanned ground vehicles like PackBot do the dirty work
of finding and disarming mines and IEDs - or getting themselves blown
up if they fail to disarm the bombs properly, so that a human soldier
doesn't have to meet that fate.
The PackBot and several other models of military robots are made by
iRobot, the firm best known in consumer circles for its automated
vacuum cleaner, the Roomba, and related products.
Where robots in the factory are nothing new, robots roaming the
hallways of our hospitals, sweeping the floors of our homes, and
pounding dirt with our soldiers suggest that they will probably be
coming soon to our office cubicles.
General purpose, highly adaptable robots in the mode of C3PO and
R2D2 are still well over the horizon. But these machines are working
their way up the curve of autonomy, so they don't require
minute-by-minute supervision. Many of the military robots are still
tele-robotically operated, but the UAVs have largely automated the
mechanics of takeoff, landing, and cruising through the skies so that
the human operator can focus more on mission planning rather than
having to control the craft with a joystick. The Roomba is valuable
because it does it work autonomously, creating a mental map of the
layout of your home so it can maneuver around cleaning.
That hospital
supply delivery robot learns its way around the building and knows when
to return to its docking station to recharge its batteries. I was told
that its biggest challenge was running into 12-year-old boys who think
it's funny to jump in front of the robot again and again, making it
stop and patiently ask them to please stand aside.Occasionally, it just gets stuck behind some obstacle, and someone has to track it down and rescue it.
The technology is getting good enough that more and more menial or dangerous tasks can be delegated to robots.
Are there robots at work in your business? Should there be? Are you planning for how they should be integrated with the rest of your information and automation systems?
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