Diligent Robotics, a Texas-based robotics company, unveiled a new robot for hospitals. The announcement was made on Tuesday. The robot is called as Moxi and in 2018, its pilot was carried out in four hospitals in Texas.
Designed to include mobile manipulation and social intelligence capabilities: Moxi
Fetch Robotics helped the company to create the robot on its mobile base and navigation software based on the Robot Operating System.
Other companies such as Velodyne, Intel, Kinova, and Robotiq contributed items such as a lidar sensor, a camera, an arm, and a gripper respectively. The robot has a humanoid face to communicate with the people around him. It can change its head and torso according to height.
Andrea Thomaz, one of the founders of Diligent Robotics, spoke exclusively to The Robot Report and shared few things about the new development. She told that during the beta trials of Moxi, the company was focused on learning as much as we could about clinical workflows and opportunities for automation to make the biggest impact.
The company gained so much knowledge from all of the 125 nurses that the robot worked alongside during the pilot and now the excitement is high to act on those learnings. The robot doesn’t carry out patient-facing tasks. It can do tasks such as transporting supplies to hospital and nursing units, and samples to laboratories.
Currently, Moxi is available as a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.
