San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Robots likely to help, not replace, workers
“Everybody that’s worried about losing jobs to automation, there’s a whole diversity of jobs that will open in these tech areas.”
The robots are coming.
But that might be a good thing in the postpandemic operating rooms and grocery stores of the future.
As the world adapts to a future in which cleanliness is king, people and companies may increasingly turn to robots to perform tasks previously reserved for humans, experts and technologists said.
Those who have seen robots only in movies may also become more open to their increasing integration
Karen Panetta, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts University
into daily life, and equipment once seen as a costly luxury may become indispensable to avert the risk of becoming infected by a superbug.
One of those robots, called Tally, is made by San Francisco’s Simbe Robotics and already roves the aisles of supermarkets the country over, counting items on shelves and reporting back to its human controllers.
“Tally can more accurately analyze what’s on the shelf and not,
freeing up the store team to do tasks like customer service, restocking and sanitization,” said Simbe CEO Brad Bogolea. The robot exemplifies a future in which, instead of robots wiping out swathes of the job market, they do the menial jobs that allow humans to focus on more complex tasks and stay out of harm’s way.
“Everybody that’s worried about losing jobs to automation, there’s a whole diversity of jobs that will open in these tech areas because you’re not going to go fully automated tomorrow,” said Karen Panetta, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts University in Massachusetts. “You still need humans in the loop,” she said.
A tool like Tally could also be used in the stores of tomorrow to enforce social distancing measures and allow fewer employees to be in aisles taking stock, reducing risk.
Bogloea said most of the company’s robots are deployed in stores across the Midwest, where people are less accustomed than those in the Bay Area to seeing autonomous cars taking to the road. That hasn’t prevented stores from adopting the technology.
“We started seeing strong acceptance preCOVID,” Bogolea said. “This type of pandemic opens up a much greater opportunity” for technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence to take hold, he said.
That increased acceptance may mean more time for complex tasks in the consumer realm, but the same may not be true when it comes to the industrial setting.
On average, each industrial robot replaced more than three workers nationally, according to a report from MIT News on a recent study by Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Acemoglu found that adding one more robot per thousand workers in the industrial setting also reduces wages by nearly half a percent. Beyond consumer and industrial applications, medicine may also be more accepting to robotics, Panetta said.
“People have been resistant because they want the human doctor,” Panetta said. But a robot swabbing someone for the coronavirus could allow frontline medical staff to perform more essential functions and keep them out of the path of the virus, she added.
Shai Policker, CEO of medical technology incubator Medx Xelerator, has been grappling with the acceptance of robotic technologies for years.
“Just six months ago, talking to a physician ... they’d say, ‘Well, I’d like to be near my patient,’ ”
Policker said. “Suddenly those physicians are more readily adaptive to the idea of operating remotely” because of the risk of infection, he added.
Policker said two companies his accelerator has helped fund — a disposable robotic system that assists in navigating through complex blood vessels and an imaging technology that can detect problems during kidney dialysis — allow doctors and nurses to be further away from potentially infected patients during procedures.
While these machines can be expensive to buy and install, Policker said those walls may come down as preventing the transmission of the virus, particularly to already unwell people, becomes a core focus.
Medical settings present other unique challenges, particularly when it comes to cleanliness, in normal times but even more so during a pandemic. Researchers including Professor Kenji Shimada at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh are working on robotic solutions beyond what is currently available.
Shimada is working on a mobile robotic arm able to disinfect highrisk areas like hospital rooms using chemicals or ultraviolet light. He envisions a technology able to map a room and track where the machine has cleaned.
“Nothing is visible so you need a digital model to keep track of that,” Shimada said of finding and killing the coronavirus and other microscopic threats. He said he plans to begin testing prototypes on campus, but it could be a year or two before an operational version of the machine is ready, underscoring the need to repurpose some technologies for the time being.
That includes drones. Health authorities have said a return to normal will require robust testing along with an army of contact tracers to fight the virus. Because not everyone lives in a city where drivethrough testing is available, some companies are looking at how to use drones to pick up and deliver samples.
Volansi, a Concord drone company, is working on the problem of how people can hand off their samples to a lab simply by placing them in one of the company’s drones, which can take off and land vertically and access almost any location.
CEO and cofounder
Hannan Parvizian said the business so far has focused on moving items around countries with emerging economies and limited ground infrastructure, where regulations around drone activity are more lax.
Restrictions in the U.S. will need to be loosened, however, for companies like Parvizian’s to take to the skies loaded with virus samples.
The Federal Aviation Administration requires drone operators to be able to see the drone they are controlling, whereas technology like Parvizian’s relies on programmed flight paths ranging from 50 to 200 miles.
The FAA does make exceptions that can make drone operation easier for companies like Volansi. California drone operators, some of them first responders, received more than 400 waivers to go beyond current FAA regulations, the most of any state, according to the nonprofit, Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
“In the aftermath of the coronavirus, what I’ve seen is that the public is extremely aware of how relevant this technology is,” Parvizian said. He added: “What we’re hoping to change is the regulators, based on the pressure they see from the public, will work harder to put a framework in place to enable this technology.”
Chase DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: chase. difeliciantonio@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice