Japan's Nikkei Asian Review reports that China's service industry has increased its demand for robots to help restaurants and hotels overcome staffing shortages and reduce the risk of infection amid the new pneumonia epidemic.
From disinfecting hospitals and streets to delivering food, medicine and supplies, China's robots have shown "superior execution" during the outbreak, according to the Consumer News & Business Channel.
CNN reports that China's war against the epidemic has become a "training ground" for robots.
According to the International Federation of Robotics, robots can be divided into two categories: service robots and industrial robots. Both types of robots have been developed to varying degrees during China's fight against the new pneumonia epidemic: industrial robots play a role in the production of epidemic prevention materials, while service robots are used more often in emergency response and support operations, which is the fastest growing category of robots in the epidemic.
In the service robots, the first category is disinfection robots. During epidemic prevention and control, in order to reduce the labor intensity of manual disinfection and the risk of cross-infection, disinfection robots replace manual labor and engage in disinfection work in hospitals, outdoor and other places. However, these robots are still in the remote control or semi-autonomous stage. The second type of robot is the transfer robot. These robots can follow the planned navigation route and deliver food and medicine to wards through human-machine interaction instead of medical staff, reducing the direct contact between medical staff and patients. In addition, during the epidemic prevention and control period, transfer robots also played an efficient group control transport role in the epidemic prevention and supply depot.
In addition, the epidemic has increased the demand for industrial robots in the market. Especially in the workshops producing epidemic prevention supplies, robots on automated production lines have effectively improved the production efficiency of medical protection materials by virtue of their advantages in clean protection and high-speed operation.
The development of epidemic prevention robots is time-consuming, and robotics companies have relatively little incentive to develop such robots before an epidemic outbreak. Therefore, in the face of sudden epidemics, major companies adapt to market demand mainly by modifying existing robots. For example, inspection and cleaning robots, by improving protection and storage and other devices, take up the task of epidemic prevention material delivery and remote consultation. Such robots have been used in epidemic prevention and present certain advantages, but there are still problems such as long work preparation time, low efficiency and insufficient operational autonomy.
At present, the development of robots in China still has many problems that need to be solved. The application of robots first needs to solve the problem of environmental perception. Most of the existing robots' environment perception capability is still in static environment, and the real-time and depth of dynamic environment perception is insufficient. In terms of human-robot interaction capability, the existing robots' cognition of human intention, behavior and emotion needs to be improved. Taking epidemic prevention robots as an example, such robots need to make breakthroughs in core robot technologies such as application scene versatility, disposal mobility and scheduling flexibility, and continuously improve the level of intelligent planning and autonomy.
China's robotics industry developed late and has been vigorously promoted in recent years with the support of national policies. The country has given a lot of policy and financial support to robotics R&D. For example, the government has issued free "innovation coupons" to science and technology-based SMEs and innovation and entrepreneurship teams; the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and other national ministries and cities have released key special projects on robotics technology and equipment. These supports have greatly promoted the improvement of China's robotics technology and equipment level and enabled the rapid development of the domestic robotics industry.
In the future, service robots will see rapid development, especially in the logistics and medical industries.
The logistics industry involves a variety of industries, such as industrial and retail, and requires a variety of professional robots to solve the challenges of dynamic and fast storage, inbound and outbound storage and transfer of multiple species under the conditions of the Internet of Things, and gradually realize intelligent logistics. At present, transfer robots have been used in many fields, such as logistics shelf robots for e-commerce enterprises and drug transfer robots for hospitals.
Robots in the medical industry have high added value and can help medical personnel perform high-precision testing or surgery. Epidemic prevention and control has created more demand for further development of medical robots. For example, healthcare workers face a high risk of infection during the collection of pharyngeal swabs, and coupled with the small space in the human nasal and oral cavities, the fragile surface layer and high sampling requirements, it is urgent to promote further development of pharyngeal swab detection robots. At present, pharyngeal prevention robots are gradually becoming one of the important branches of the robotics industry.
With the integration of 5G, artificial intelligence and robotics, robots will come more into people's lives and be ubiquitous in the future.
