Intelligent robotic gloves are coming to a factory near you
Robotic gloves that not only reduce the strain on workers but learn and improve over time are set to become an increasingly common sight in factories after the launch of an updated soft robotic strengthening system known as Ironhand.
The technology is designed to reduce strain for workers, strengthening their grip and so allowing them to work longer with less effort without getting tired or risking strain-related injury.
The first version of Ironhand, which launched a year ago, provided grip-strengthening capabiltiies, but the updated version announced today significantly improves on the technology, not only through design refinements but with the introduction of an intelligent system that optimises over time.
This works by imitating and enhancing the hand’s existing movements, applying refinements as it is used to effectively tailor itself to its user.
The data the robotic gloves collect is also used to monitor and ensure ongoing safety by allowing companies to identify workers or tasks that carry a higher risk of injury through strain.
Robotic gloves for factories and beyond
Ironhand, which is developed by Bioservo Technologies, is worn as a single lightweight glove, but is connected via cable to a backpack that carries a portable power pack.
It is designed to trigger its Soft Extra Muscle (SEM) technology when a user attempts to apply grip, providing up to 80 Newtons (N) of additional force to augment the wearer’s own strength. This kicks in within milliseconds, making the technology natural to use within working environments.
While the robotic gloves are primarily designed for use in factory settings, Bioservo also sees significant potential in the construction industry, where many tasks are grip-based.
Ironhand soft robotic gloves are powered by a battery pack in a custom backpack. (via Bioservo Technologies)
Growing support for skills-enhancing soft robotics
Ironhand is one of a growing number of products that are utilising soft robotics to augment the wearer’s own physical capabilities.
These are increasingly being explored for assistive applications among the disabled and elderly, but with an often ageing manual workforce and growing concerns surrounding health and safety, companies are increasingly interested in applying the technology at work.
“Since the launch of Ironhand, about a year ago, we have noticed an increasing interest from a large number of industrial players,” explained Petter Bäckgren, CEO of Bioservo Technologies.
“The technology has continuously been tested and evaluated by our partners and customers to ensure its suitability in meeting the market requirements. We are very pleased to now introduce the all-new Ironhand with its significant improvements aiming to further prevent strain injuries and support the worker.”
The pandemic has been good for one kind of worker: robots
Now that any job involving human contact is considered hazardous, demand for mechanical replacements has skyrocketed.
Spot, a four-legged robot about the size of a golden retriever, became commercially available last year for industrial uses—inspecting construction sites, patrolling power plants, and other chores in places a wheeled robot can't go.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and Spot learned some new tricks.
In the past six months, Spots have delivered food to quarantined patients in Singapore, and danced around at a Japanese baseball game as a mechanical substitute for human fans. In Singapore last May, after a social-distance enforcement officer was stabbed by an unmasked man, a Spot was tested for the role of “safe distance ambassador” in Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. There, a human worker, at a safe distance, used the robot to observe people and to play pre-recorded "let's keep Singapore healthy" reminders. (Read all about the robot revolution in the September issue of National Geographic.)
Meanwhile in Boston, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Spot equipped with an iPad greeted arrivals, enabling staff to screen prospective patients remotely. Other Spots outfitted with sensors allowed doctors and nurses to take temperatures, measure respiration, and even monitor blood oxygen levels without being in the same room as a patient.
All these experiments were a natural shift for a machine designed "to take people out of hazardous jobs," says Michael Perry, vice president of business development at Spot's creator, Boston Dynamics. In this pandemic, "hazardous job" now covers any activity that brings people together.
Wearing a face shield to show COVID team spirit, a 5-foot tall robot called Alexia brings a drink to a customer at a bar in Pamplona, Spain. The bartender uses the robot’s screen to select the table, and the robot is guided by magnetic strips on the ground.Photograph by Alvaro Barrientos/AP Photo
Demand for robots that can do human chores has skyrocketed around the world. As of early July, robots of all sorts were directly involved fighting the pandemic in at least 33 nations, according to Robotics for Infectious Diseases, an organization of researchers. COVID-19 is driving robots into aspects of daily life where they've seldom or never been seen before.
The pandemic will pass some day. But the robots will probably stay.
"When you see the breadth of the use of robots across so many applications, I think this is our breakthrough moment," says Robin R. Murphy of Texas A&M, a leading scholar of "disaster robotics" and chair of Robotics for Infectious Diseases. "People who would have said it was stupid to use a robot to deliver food, now they're getting groceries with them. Small businesses are using them. We've never seen this before. Robots are becoming more pervasive."
First responders
In the pandemic's first few weeks, hospitals and clinics sought robots to respond to the immediate catastrophe, Murphy says —just as people have deployed robots after earthquakes, mine collapses, and terrorist attacks over the past 20 years. Last spring, hospitals in Europe, Asia, and North America were acquiring robots for "telemedicine" (using the robot to connect patients and doctors) and "telepresence," where patients use the robot to see and speak with loved ones. Others bought robots that independently enter a room and disinfect it with chemicals or ultraviolet light. Public-safety authorities dispatched robots (on streets or in the air) to disinfect public spaces and to look for people violating stay-inside orders.
Many roboticists—used to public fears about safety, privacy, creepiness or job losses—were surprised to see resistance to the machines evaporate.
"Things that would have maybe taken us six months are now opening up immediately, and regulations have been loosened at a surprisingly fast rate," says Anthony Nunez, whose Virginia company, INF Robotics, makes an eldercare robot called Rudy. Home-care agencies he deals with have had to cut back workers, Nunez says, because in a pandemic many elderly people no longer wish to have close contact with human aides.
A young girl disinfects her hands with sanitizer dispensed by a robot walking around Central World, an upmarket shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand.Photograph by Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP Photo
Hospitals and other medical facilities now "are trying to run with minimum number of people, to minimize the exposure that people have to disease," says Andrea Thomaz, co-founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics, which makes a robot nurse assistant called Moxi. COVID-19 has made medical staff more aware than ever "how important it is to have their essential staff focused on the tasks at hand and not focused on any of the busy work that takes them away from patient care and clinical work," Thomaz says.
As the pandemic makes many people more accepting of robots, Murphy says, it's also making many roboticists more alert to ordinary people's needs. For example, one team of eager robot engineers approached an Italian hospital last spring with a design for a robot that could deliver food to patients. They soon learned that for isolated COVID-19 patients, mealtime “was the only time they saw people socially," Murphy explains.
Even before the pandemic, Medical City Heart Hospital in Dallas, Texas, was testing Moxi, a robot assistant designed to take some of the burden off nurses like Ming McDowell—by delivering samples to the lab, for example.Photography by Spencer Lowell
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So the roboticists switched problems. Instead of replacing the humans who delivered meals, they created a simple tele-presence robot that could visit patients and provide a live link to a loved one. The device was made from off-the-shelf parts, inexpensive, easy to maintain, and didn't require overworked hospital staff to spend any time on it. And patients and relatives loved being able to see and hear one another.
Ready or not
Not everyone is convinced a new robot age is dawning. Skeptics point out that even supposedly "autonomous" robots often need a human supervisor to jump in when the machine is stumped by the challenge of navigating streets, hospitals, warehouses, or homes. For now, most of the work COVID-19 created—in patient care, delivery, enforcement, and other areas—is still performed by people.
A different concern is that robots may prove to be too good at what they do—that they'll permit massive surveillance and privacy violation, or that they'll make it too easy to do harm to the environment in the name of pandemic response. Last winter flying robots in China were used to douse public places with disinfectants, Murphy noted. “We don’t know what the environmental impact has been,” she said in an email. “There has not been any data on which disinfectants are being used in what concentrations and whether there was any runoff into sewers and water supply."
Murphy and her colleagues recently surveyed reports in social media, journalism, and scholarly journals about robots’ use related to COVID-19. Out of 262 reports between March and July, 45 focused on ethical concerns, the survey revealed. Of those, 17 were about threats of excessive surveillance or violations of privacy.
Then, as always with robots, there are fears for people's jobs. In the spring, as the pandemic was ramping up, employers adopting robots were focused on protecting their employees, not replacing them. But that may be changing, Murphy says.
"Around June, we began to see a call for increased automation, not to increase capacity or handle surge but to handle worker loss," she says. Meatpacking plants, e-commerce warehouses, and other facilities are considering robot workers as a way to keep human employees safely distant from one another, Murphy says. "We may get some job displacement or job loss as a result. We don't know how that's going to turn out."
Still, people around the world appear more willing than ever to let robots do work once done by humans, and there are more robot makers than ever offering products in response. The COVID-19 pandemic has launched a global experiment in how, where, and why to insert robots into daily life.
"Times are good for robotics, although they're not good for us as a society," Antonio Bicchi, a professor of robotics at the University of Pisa, told a panel on robotics and COVID-19 in May, at the annual (and this year virtual) International Conference on Robotics and Automation. "For robotics, this is a time to help. And I think we are ready."
10 Examples Of Robots Helping To Fight COVID
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Many companies have plans to implement robots and automation in their long-term strategies, but COVID-19 has forced organizations towards a digital transformation sooner than they had planned and sped up the growth of robots. These robots are being used in a number of ways to limit the spread of coronavirus and help fight COVID.
Customers want more human interaction in the future, not necessarily more technology. But these are unique and uncertain times, and robots and technology are some of the best resources for fighting COVID. Even before the pandemic, robots were on the rise and the market for service robots was growing. In 2018, 271,000 service robots were shipped—an increase of 60% over 2017. Service robots can perform a huge variety of tasks, and it’s never been more important than now.
As new information is learned about the spread of COVID, there comes a demand for robots to take over tasks from humans in high-risk areas. In many cases, robots are being used to limit human exposure and flatten the curve for the benefit of employees and customers. Only time will tell if employers will rehire humans once COVID passes, or if the robots will take jobs from humans in a post-COVID world. One thing we know for sure - customers are watching how businesses treat their employees. Customers will have no problem vocalizing concerns if businesses simply replace as many humans as possible with a robotic workforce. But for the time being, robots can be our friend in the fight against COVID.
Here are 10 examples of robots helping to fight COVID and move people out of high-risk situations:
1. Robots are being used to disinfect hospitals and kill coronavirus. Denmark has shipped hundreds of its UVD (ultraviolet light disinfection) robots to China and Europe during the pandemic. At the end of 2019, UVD projected a 2020 growth rate of 400%, but the company has already hit 5x that. In February, the company sold more robots in a single day than it had during its first full year of commercial viability.
2. San Diego-based Brain Corp makes software for automated floor cleaners. Retailers are using automated cleaners 13% now than they were two months ago. Autonomous floor care robots do 8,000 hours of daily work that would otherwise have to be done by human employees and put them at risk.
3. Many supermarkets are turning to robots to fill orders. At Giant Eagle, robots are taking over inventory, which frees human employees to focus on disinfecting and sanitizing surfaces. Automation creates a more efficient shopping experience and frees up resources to keep the store clean.
4. Some grocery stores are adopting robotic contactless options and asking customers to use mobile payment services instead of traditional payment methods. Regulators in Europe recently increased the amount of money shoppers can pay through mobile devices, which reduces authentication requirements. People realize that today, being a cashier is a dangerous job and puts people in contact with germs and other people.
5. Robots are being used throughout traditional brick-and-mortar as stores face significant pressure. Increased demand for essential items and periods of intense shopper foot traffic have made many retailers, especially grocery stores, places of chaos. Ruptured supply chains have led to uncertainty to the flow of stock. Robots help ease supply chain difficulties by getting the right items to the right stores and stocking shelves.
6. Robots in retail help with a speedier shopping experience. Robots perform a variety of tasks including preparing orders, performing inventory checks and bagging and delivering groceries and other essential items. Walmart, the largest retailer in the country, is testing self-driving machines at more than 1,000 of its stores to deliver groceries to customers who can’t make it to the store to shop during the pandemic.
7. The average utilization of brain-powered robots in retail has increased 13% since January 2020. Brain-powered robots work with the cloud to interpret digital commands and move them to the physical world. These types of robots can be used in a variety of ways like navigating public spaces to avoid people and managing data while seamlessly interacting with customers. Brain-powered retail robots provide a strong experience with limited human exposure.
8. Robots are also being used to provide a more efficient experience for customers in need. In the last month, Paypal has switched to using chatbots for 65% of its message-based customer inquiries. It also started using automated translation services so English-speaking representatives can speak to customers who don’t speak English.
9. YouTube has also shifted towards the use of robots. In recent weeks, the company has had fewer people doing content moderation and more machines. Automated systems will soon start removing content without human review.
10. Robots can work in closer proximity to each other than humans can with social distancing. Many essential workers are concerned about coming to work during the coronavirus pandemic and putting themselves at risk. Recycling workers who make $10 an hour have to work in close proximity to their co-workers and can’t practice social distancing. Robots can sort recycling much more safely than humans.
One of the most effective ways to fight COVID is to limit human exposure. In a time of social distancing, robots make it possible for businesses to continue while still protecting their customers and employees.