Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how Spot eliminates the potential for virus transmission, especially if it's performing up-close checking of vitals on multiple patients.
Granted, Spot can't contract or respirate COVID-19, so it doesn't need a mask or a gown, but unless it's taking a rubbing alcohol bath between each patient visit, couldn't the virus still be transmitted via surface contact?
I'm assuming that they can use some relatively harsh chemicals on the robot that wouldn't necessarily be safe for a person. And obviously not being able to respirate the illness is a significant improvement.
It doesn’t breathe and it’s easier to wipe clean, which pretty much makes it impossible to transmit Covid. Don’t know how it takes vitals, but they probably use clean instruments for each test one can assume.
Something simpler can work just as well or much easier and this holds for many many problems or tasks. To do dishes, we do not have robot arms holding a brush but dishwashers. Think of a Roomba vs. robot with a sweeper etc. Instead of a robot stocking shelves in a super market, just have home delivery and cut out the shelves entirely. Cooking robots vs. microwave meals.
The issue with all of the above is that each of those can only do 1 task (and do it well). Humans can do multiple things well while reusing the same bits for multiple tasks. A mopping and a vacuum robot are very much alike and share a huge portion of the software and hardware. <strike>Robots</strike> Tools like a Roomba need to be cheap enough to warrant their cost for a task you only need a X times a week/day/moth/year. So, a Roomba is has to be cheap enough.
Spot (and other robots) are more expensive but also more versatile and should be capable of doing more tasks.
But, finally, robots bringing beer, yes, the holy grail of robotics!
Not to be too blunt here, but: besides very impressive numbers of youtube views, what have those robots accomplished, in a “we have deployed X thousand of these in the following Y situations” sense, since 2006?
I’m (way more than) fine with blue sky work, and BD deserves credit for not building weapons, but at the same time there’s an impedance mismatch here.
If you're interested Adam Savage was allowed to use a 'Spot' robot for several months and shares some observations and information on actual usage on his youtube channel.
reading between the lines, as of Q4 last year they're still in _extremely_ early in any meaningful deployment. Lease-based alpha access to select customers, "hey we don't have to send a 12-man team out every month anymore", and carefully PRd information is certainly some kind of progress, but it's not anything like normal use.
Definitely not normal use, probably something akin to controlled alpha or beta testing. The only recent article a saw about the fall 2019 trials/leases was this article that didn't provide any meaningful details on usage.
If I saw this escapee from a Metal Gear game coming in to check up on me, my first instinct would be to run, or perhaps hide under the nearest cardboard box of sufficient size.
I wonder if it would make sense to use the telepresence bots from Double Robotics for something like this. It seems to have similar capabilities (I'm assuming there aren't many stairs on the hospital floor) and costs an order of magnitude less: https://www.doublerobotics.com/
I wonder how it is cleaned. Parts of it look like they might be hard to clean effectively. Is it water resistant and capable of being (safely) sprayed down with a disinfectant?
What is it that makes spot better at telepresence, telemedicine, remote vital inspection, internal delivery or disinfecting hospital rooms than, say, a roomba platform?
Granted, Spot can't contract or respirate COVID-19, so it doesn't need a mask or a gown, but unless it's taking a rubbing alcohol bath between each patient visit, couldn't the virus still be transmitted via surface contact?