Every day, Herman Gomez watches his team of seven robots tour Adventist Health White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles. Supplied by robot maker Xenex, these robots look exactly like R2-D2 from Star Wars and disinfect rooms with UV light throughout the day, providing a second level of sanitation that cleanses off microorganisms left behind by the human cleaners that came first. . . . . .
Michal Lev-Ram and Brian O’Keefe about how they are doing. going. going. going. robots that are currently behaving. integrated into society along with humans.
“You will see that [the robots] are deployed 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day because we have a lot of isolation rooms,” says Gomez, who oversees the hospital’s environmental services department. “After all the surgeries for the day are completed, our [environmental services] professionals go there to clean the room and then they also deploy the Xenex UV light disinfection robot in the room to make sure everything has been disinfected. completely. “
While Gomez focuses on robots’ ability for good, senior writer Jeremy Kahn joins the podcast to discuss the potential threats from these cleaning robots, which he describes as the “gateway drug to robotics.” . , could represent for human works.
What happened is they just reassigned the cleaners to do those high-contact areas that robots can’t really do. Instead of the humans cleaning the floor, they have the humans making the fixtures in the bathroom or the door handles and railings, and they just let the robot do the floors.
About halfway through the podcast, Lev-Ram and O’Keefe bring in Dr. Mariana Matus, CEO and co-founder of Biobot Analytics, to talk about how robots can be designed to do jobs humans have no interest in doing. themselves. First: collect data from our wastewater.
To learn more about what Dr. Matus’s robots do for the communities they work in, and to hear an MIT professor theorize what the future holds in terms of robotic intelligence, listen to the previous episode.
