Boston Dynamics offers an IIoT robot named Spot that autonomously accomplishes industrial sensing and remote operational tasks. Recently, the company said that health care facilities have been using the four-legged robots in a mobile telemedicine role. Spot was first deployed at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, equipped with an iPad on its back which enables medical staff to have two-way video chats with patients without the risk of virus spread. Due to the success of this application, the company plans to eventually equip Spot with sensors that will measure a patient’s pulse, temperature and oxygen levels. The company’s blog tells the full story.
Mobile robots play a vital role in removing people from dangerous environments. We have spent the last six weeks building and testing a payload and application architecture that would enable our robot, Spot, to help reduce exposure of frontline healthcare workers to the novel COVID-19 virus.
We developed the payload, hardware, and software for this application so that they are generalizable and able to be deployed on other mobile robotic platforms with APIs and capacity for custom payloads.
Today, we are sharing the results of our initial work deploying the robot with Bringham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts and we are open-sourcing the hardware and software designs used to get these robots into the field. Our hope is that these tools can enable developers and roboticists to rapidly deploy robots in order to reduce risks to medical staff.
