COVID-19 Should Be Wake-Up Call for Robotics Research

Pandemic response requires "dull, dirty, dangerous" jobs suited for robots. Robots could perform some of the "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs associated with combating the COVID-19 pandemic, but that would require many new capabilities not currently being funded or developed, an editorial Robotics argues. The editorial, published Wednesday and signed by leading academic researchers including Carnegie Mellon University's Howie Choset , said robots conceivably could perform such tasks as disinfecting surfaces, taking temperatures of people in public areas or at ports of entry, providing social support for quarantined patients, collecting nasal and throat samples for testing, and enabling people to virtually attend conferences and exhibitions. In each case, the use of robots could reduce human exposure to pathogens - which will become increasingly important as epidemics escalate. "The experiences with the (2015) Ebola outbreak identified a broad spectrum of use cases, but funding for multidisciplinary research, in partnership with agencies and industry, to meet these use cases remains expensive, rare and directed to other applications," the researchers noted in the editorial. "Without a sustainable approach to research, history will repeat itself, and robots will not be ready for the next incident," they added. In addition to Choset, a professor in CMU's Robotics Institute and one of the founding editors of Science Robotics, the authors of the editorial include Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Science; Robin Murphy of Texas A&M University; Henrik Christensen of the University of California, San Diego; and former CMU faculty member Steven Collins, now at Stanford University.