Picking Up The Slack

A shortage of foreign workers in Singapore due to the pandemic has led businesses to increasingly turn to robots to fill jobs. Robots are carrying out a range of tasks, from surveying construction sites to making coffee and even scanning library bookshelves.

A four-legged robot ‘dog’ called Spot scans sections of mud and gravel at a Gammon construction site to check on work progress, with data fed back to the company’s control room. Meanwhile, more than 30 metro stations have robots busily making coffee for commuters, while Singapore’s National Library has introduced two shelf-reading robots that can scan labels on 100,000 books, or about 30 per cent of its collection, per day. “Staff need not read the call numbers one by one on the shelf, and this reduces the routine and labour-intensive aspects,” says assistant director Lee Yee Fuang.

Singapore has 605 robots installed per 10,000 employees in the manufacturing industry, the second-highest number globally after South Korea’s 932, according to a 2021 report by the International Federation of Robotics.