APPLETON, Wis. (WBAY) -- Students put their STEM skills to the test in Appleton Saturday for the VEX Robotics State Championship.

More than 700 elementary, middle and high school students from around the state competed at the Fox Cities Expo Center.

Teams had to design, build and program their own robots to complete certain challenges.

"You have to get as many blocks as you can and stack them in the corner. Whoever has the most points at the end wins, but the towers on the field are multipliers. So, if you get an orange block in the tower, all the orange blocks in the corner are scored for more points," explainted Hilbert Robotics team member Andrew Mader.

Teams that qualify will advance to the World Championship.

The competition is put on by Fox Valley Competitive Robotics Inc.

In addition to STEM skills, the non-profit says it also teaches students teamwork, leadership and project management.

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Robotics students put STEM skills to the test at state championship - WBAY

Nurse Cao Shan, right, working in the isolation ward, shows the conditions of a patient to a co-worker in Jinyintan Hospital. She and her husband, a doctor also working at the hospital, have slept in the vehicle for 23 nights to avoid bringing viral hazards around, save commuting time, and give their assigned nearby hotel room to colleagues.

Feature China | Barcroft Media via Getty Images

With top government health officials warning it is only a matter of time before there is a COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., it's not likely that specialized masks and respirators, or canned goods and Clorox, will be sufficient to fight a global pandemic. Viral outbreaks like COVID-19 highlight the growing role new medical technology in particular, ideas from the field of robotics can play in fighting the spread of novel infectious diseases. But medical experts say it will be a mistake if innovation rolls out only when the world is on edge.

"Extreme cases make us rethink how we do things," says Dr. Robin Murphy, Raytheon professor of computer science & engineering at Texas A&M University. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in Texas, the first in the U.S., led to years of study by Murphy and others on emergency response and the integration of robotics with medicine to help limit pathways for a highly contagious disease to spread. "A hospital lost a whole wing temporarily. Two ambulances were infected," she recalled.

Still, she says, not enough has changed. Wild ideas from the world of robotics capture attention, but health-care experts like Murphy are focused on more basic automated solutions, like seeing robots perform routine medical work for contagious patients, without replacing or eliminating health-care workers, to free up medical staff so they can spend more time on direct care, as well as reduce risk of their exposure.

For starters, the robots don't look like people.

"There are lots of start-ups based on humanoid robots. No, no, no," Murphy said.

Think robots capable of helping to change IV bags or take patient samples, which require fine manipulation that is harder to perform in heavy and hot protective gear.

"There's an exposure risk just to change an IV bag," Murphy said. "Some things are so routine we take them for granted. How many times have you been in a hospital with loved ones and you hear that beep, beep, beep. ... Why aren't we automating it?"

Hospital beds that can be automated to cycle through a series of positions (e.g., elevate head for X amount of time, then lower and elevate Y) can perform work that is difficult to do for health-care professionals while they are wearing protective gear and focused on higher-priority items. "The medical professionals said they were always behind," according to Murphy, but this was one task that Ebola workers found did provide patient benefits.

Robots designed for handling biohazardous waste and decontaminating rooms and ambulances are also ideas born out of an era of increasing experience with pandemic risks.

"Why waste a person carrying the trash? Why send a nurse in to change a position on the bed. Now we're not thinking of the robots as things that look like a dog or humanoids think of the bed itself as being a robot," Murphy said.

Health officials wearing protective clothing carry medical waste out of an isolation ward at the Ernakulam Medical College in Kochi, India, on February 8, 2020. Robotic biohazardous waste removal has been promoted by experts in the U.S., including Texas A&M computer science and engineering professor Dr. Robin Murphy, an emergency response robotics advisor, who had direct experience with the 2015 Ebola outbreak in the U.S.

ARUN CHANDRABOSE | AFP via Getty Images

Dr. Edward Damrose, chief of medical staff at Stanford Health Care, said that to some extent the robots are already present and playing a role in our health-care system though many people are not aware of it. At Stanford, diagnosis and recommendations can come from telemedicine, and in the hospital, robots are bringing supplies and linens to the ward.

Stanford Medical Center IV bags are wirelessly connected to a network and can be remotely programmed an IV bag Internet of Things though the system does not include the robotic changing of bags that Murphy envisions. Sensors from Leaf Healthcare are used in the Stanford hospital to prompt nursing staff to turn or ambulate patients. UV sanitizing robots from Xenex are used in highly contagious infection rooms where virulent organisms are present. "I have a feeling in time that may become standard," Damrose said. "Look at the antibiotic crisis and how these organisms are adapting to disinfectants and antibiotics. It doesn't make sense to hand clean a room. Rooms of the future could all have UV cleaning robots."

But Damrose said much manual labor that nurses still often perform because physicians don't have the time, and residents in training have other priorities, are obvious places to look for robotic alternatives. Humans in a protective covering will always be available and required for lifesaving or critical care, but simple interactions can be handled by robots and reduce the "mundane risks of virus," Damrose said.

A nurse working in the isolation ward communicates with a co-worker on the talkie-walkie in Jinyintan Hospital, designated for COVID-19 patients, in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province Monday, Feb. 17, 2020.

Feature China | Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Transmission risks from spillover events are occurring with more frequency, said Dr. Jason Moats, associate division director with the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service's Emergency Services Training Institute (TEEX), one of the largest training providers for first responders, emergency managers, and local government officials. It trained over 200,000 people last year from more than 100 countries.

"Robotics for menial tasks does not mean unimportant tasks," Moats said. "Moving patients around, radiology ... intake of patients. It could be a little robot the size of a Roomba that hooks into a bed," said Moats, who has been preparing the nation's first responders and emergency managers to respond to disasters, including infectious diseases, for more than two decades, and more specifically on enhance response technology since the 201415 Ebola outbreak.

"We bring out specialized equipment for these novel events, but if we're going to have specialized equipment it better be integrated into everyday operations. Then it becomes institutionalized and adopted," he said. "If we can teach a robot to aim a weapon, we can teach it to aim a bottle of disinfectant."

Dr. Laurel Riek, a professor of computer science and engineering, and emergency medicine at UC San Diego, said during the recent Ebola outbreaks health-care workers could sometimes spend over an hour getting into protective gear. While that helped improve safety, it was time intensive and took them away from treating patients. Even with strict protocols, a number of health-care workers were infected and died, and that is repeating itself in the COVID-19 outbreak, with many health-care workers infected and some fatalities.

Riek said systems that enable clinicians to control mobile manipulators such as mobile robots with the ability to grasp and manipulate objects are getting closer to the point of becoming affordable. "It's possible well-designed robots could help reduce the risks to health-care workers, who are already at a high risk of workplace injury," said Riek, who also serves as director of UC San Diego's Healthcare Robotics Lab. Robots can be used to take vital signs, provide comfort care, perform minor procedures and perform some delivery and cleaning tasks.

But don't think that anytime soon a "robot injects needles into veins like a phlebotomist does," Murphy said.

How to incorporate robotic technology into infectious-disease care is an issue that Doctors Without Borders (Mdecins Sans Frontires), which is on the front lines of many viral outbreaks around the globe, has been weighing.

"We routinely miss opportunities to innovate during outbreaks because it is a difficult time to do so. ... Robot development is just another form of this," said Armand Sprecher, public health specialist at Doctors Without Borders who worked on the West Africa outbreak of Ebola. "Maintaining momentum (and funding) between outbreaks can be a challenge."

Doctors Without Borders does use drones for some transport, but it does not yet use robotic technology on the ground, though it is interested in the potential, Sprecher said. One reason: Needs outstripped the organization's capacity as the past Ebola outbreak grew.

"The unaddressed suffering was distressing and a challenge," he said. "The value of robots appeared to be that they were not at risk of infection and not limited by heat stress." (Protective garments can be difficult for humans to wear for extended periods of time.)

Doctors and health-care workers in an Ebola treatment center run by the humanitarian medical aid organization Medecins Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders, in Democratic Republic of the Congo. The 2018 outbreak with the tenth epidemic and the biggest ever recorded in DRC.

Andia | Universal Images Group | Getty Images

Robots may also provide a way to bring safer specimen processing and diagnostic procedures with no risk of infections to remote areas which are not up to the technological level of modern laboratory settings. "Humans are a significant source of laboratory error, so removing them where possible is often a good idea. Diagnostics requires precision, attention to detail and patience enough to do things the same way every time. Robots are good at this. People, less so," Sprecher said.

But there is a particular set of risks associated with automating too many medical tasks for Doctors without Borders, which employs a lot of local staff as part of building community trust in remote locations around the world. "If we exclude them and favor robots, we take away some of their self-efficacy and an important way for the community to know what is going on by being involved," he said.

"Outbreaks of new pathogens that lead to outsiders showing up in strange clothing coincident with lots of people dying gives rise to a host of rumors, many about what the evil people in the funny clothing are really up to. It is a tricky time to introduce novelty and innovative gadgets. This is not to say that it cannot be done, but one would have to do so with caution, transparency and communication of what one was up to," Sprecher said.

At Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a telemedical robot called Vici from InTouch Health, a company currently in the process of being acquired by Teladoc Health, was used with the first U.S. COVID-19 case. The simple-looking, lanky metal cart with a keyboard navel, tablet for a chest, and camera for a forehead allowed doctors to communicate with the patient in isolation.

"You don't want to make more people potential vectors," said Todd Czartoski, chief medical technology officer at Providence St. Joseph Health, which runs 51 hospitals including Everett, as well as more than 90 clinical programs across a total of 120 hospitals in eight states.

Three primary-care providers used the telemedical robot on a daily basis with the COVID-19 patient. "Mainly, it was communication, talking to the patient and listening to the heart and lungs, and also communicating with nursing staff in the room," Czartoski said. "It just helps to keep people from having to go in and out of the room. We still had to have a nurse gowned up with the appropriate equipment, but the robot made it easier to listen to the heart and lungs with a digital stethoscope and talk to patients without having to get suited up multiple times a day."

Amid concerns about the health-care system being able to effectively manage COVID-19 U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services Alex Azar said on Tuesday the country has a stockpile of ventilators and masks but not enough for a coronavirus outbreak, and the CDC outlined what school and business closures would look like in the event of an epidemic telemedical technology is one solution that Czartoski thinks can scale quickly.

"China is struggling, and we would struggle, too. But telehealth will not be the biggest concern in terms of shortage. In homes and ICUs and elsewhere, it is designed to be scalable. It is not quite as ubiquitous as the iPhone, but it is the same idea, so it has lots of endpoints," he said. "If we were pushed to respond to a massive demand for telehealth, I think we could."

Zoom Video Communications was one of the few stock market winners as the Dow Jones Industrial Average tanked this week, as investors bet that demand for its services would continue to grow, not just in medical contexts but for general use as more businesses instruct employees to work remotely. Teladoc shares have risen roughly 25% over the past month, and over the past month, Zoom Video's stock has risen by an even larger percentage.

The Providence chief technology officer said even though it is the Vici robot that the organization's team of primary-care physicians have relied on in treating the current coronavirus case, ultimately the hardware is not the most important innovation for the future that will be core connectivity. InTouch TV is the device that Czartoski think will be the most broadly adopted. "That's the Amazon Firestick or Google Chromecast, the HDMI computer on a stick that can plug into any TV with an HDMI port," he said. "You can put in a zoom camera and mike and it turns any TV into a telehealth portal."

InTouchHealth TV in an intensive care room. Major health-care system Providence Health & Services, which recently used the InTouch Vici telemedical robot with a Washington state coronavirus patient, says the broader adoption of telemedicine will occur through TVs like this InTouch device.

InTouch Health

Providence currently has 200 endpoints of telemedicine deployed, between robotic carts and the TVs, which are the most cost-effective because they can be put in a room at low price point. A number of its hospital are in the process of converting entire intensive care units to InTouch TV. "That is the direction the field is headed, whether with InTouch or another vendor. The hospital room anywhere in the future, expect to have a virtual visit," Czartoski said. "You can use it to talk to loved ones, family members who don't want to be exposed or on the other side of the country, and have it hardwired for you and your doctor at the same time."

Czartoski, a neurologist by training, initially began using telemedicine in work with stroke patients, one of the best early use cases for telemedicine. "If I am seeing someone with stroke symptoms I can examine them with a camera fairly quickly and tell if there is left side weakness and trouble speaking, and I can look at a CT scan and labs, and make a decision with the ER physician."

Virtual visits are booming at Providence. The nonprofit health-care system completed roughly 100,000 virtual visits in 2019. In 2012, Providence performed a few hundred telemedical visits a year, and it has been growing at a rapid pace from 12,000 in 2016 to 41,000 visits in 2018 to over 100,000 last year. That number does not include the use of telemedicine in ICU specifically.

In a pandemic it would be great to have a robot, but as a force driver across all U.S. health care it is minor.

Dr. Edward Damrose

chief of medical staff at Stanford Health Care

While the 100,000 virtual visits logged last year represents only 1% of the Providence system's 10 million annual visits, Czartoski said his focus is on the rate of growth: "We weren't even a rounding error a few years ago," he said.

The organization is forecasting that at least 10% of visits will be conducted using telemedicine in the next three to five years, and the growth could reach as high as 20% of total visits. "Years ago we set annual goals for growth and we're beating it every year because it's growing so fast," Czartoski said. "Everything in life is tied to a smart device, except health care. It is the direction we need to go. That's why I gave up running a neurology department."

Stanford also has seen a rise in telemedicine visits in its primary care department. "It is a significant number," Damrose said.

A recent survey conducted by Bain & Company anticipates a 40% increase (from 17% to 57%) in doctors using some form of telemedicine over the next two years. A handful of routine infectious diseases, hypertension, diabetes and stroke diagnosis are among health issues for which telemedicine can at this point replace an office visit.

Health care is famously slow to adopt new technologies compared to sectors like consumer or retail, and often for good reason, said Tim van Biesen, Bain global healthcare lead. There are regulatory hurdles, and reimbursements are subject to abuse, which makes insurers hesitant to cover new procedures. "But it won't resist channels of online penetration indefinitely," Van Biesen said.

The Bain survey indicating many more doctors will use telemedicine in the next two years does not imply they will use it with a majority of the patient population (Van Biesen expects it will represent no more than 10% of patients). But ultimately there's a strong case for patients to use these services, especially for follow-up appointments.

"People take time off from jobs to go wait for 45 minutes. It's disruptive to daily life and that's why compliance is particularly hard to maintain among low-income communities. Even if it were cost neutral it would be a massive step forward in patient engagement," Van Biesen said.

Big health-care systems have the incentive to continue to move in this direction because it means higher levels of utilization of their assets, including doctors, which translates into better financial performance.

"Think about a traditional hospital, where you pay a neurologist to be on call. We take that concept and put it in the cloud. We give you virtual consulting services instead of paying a stroke doctor to be available 24/7," Czartoski said. Cloud-computing based clinical services InTouch Health hosts its own private cloud network can also help health systems work around a physician shortage in the U.S. which is expected to reach as high as 122,000 doctors by 2032.

"In this country we have medical deserts, where thousands of people are dying every day because of a lack of access to care," Riek said. Tele-manipulators are not yet ready for use with the types of tasks clinicians need to do, but there is reason to believe costs can come down, and capability and usability of these devices rise at a time when general telemedicine is more widely adopted.

"Infectious disease prevention may not be the motivating fiscal factor for health systems, but telemedicine and rural health absolutely could be," Riek said.

That's the catch for the present COVID-19 outbreak, and the novel infectious diseases that comes next: technology required to fight outbreaks may not be widely available unless the broader use cases are researched and tested. Doctors Without Borders' Sprecher said most of what his organization uses in management of outbreaks is not specific to them.

The surgical masks currently in such short supply that everyone is wearing were not designed for respiratory protection in coronavirus outbreaks. The Toyota 1978 hardtop Land Cruiser is "perhaps the most important moving part of Ebola outbreak response," but this model remains in production year after year because it is used all over the developing world to cope with underdeveloped road infrastructure. Doctors Without Borders also has begun using drones, originally developed for more general use, in medical specimen transport. "I imagine the robots will be the same," he said. "Adapted/customized for use in outbreak response."

"In a pandemic it would be great to have a robot, but as a force driver across all U.S. health care, it is minor," Damrose said.

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Robotic medicine may be the weapon the world needs to combat the coronavirus - CNBC

For companies that can afford to implement both artificial intelligence and robotics, it can be a dichotomy of disruptive technologies that can work hand-in-hand if deployed correctly. As barriers to entry like cost begin to lower for disruptive technology, more companies could be using both as part of their core businesses, which should only propel disruptive-focused exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Robotics has kept pace with artificial intelligence, and its innovations have become quite practical, a Cloud Wedge article noted. Samsung unveiled a Bot Chef who is skilled at making you a salad on command, for example. Delta Airlines showed off an exoskeleton that can boost the strength and endurance of the human body. Robotics offers a lot of promise from the creation of artificial limbs to entire suits that can help us performs difficult tasks so much easier. Combining AI and robotics introduces interesting interplays. There are several benefits to the industry that the combination of AI and robotics can offer.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence and robotics will only reach greater levels, especially as the cost to implement this disruptive technology falls.

While businesses through increased demand to drive down prices will eventually make these machines affordable, for the time being (and for quite a while into the future), the application of AI and robotics as a combined unit remains too expensive to apply to routine tasks, the article added. As development in the field moves forward, we may see robots that work on machine learning within the next decade. The question of whether humanity is ready for the impact it will make both socially and economically is something that experts are still debating today.

As such, investors looking for a broad ETF play in disruptive technology can look at theARK Innovation ETF (NYSEArca: ARKK). The actively-managed ETF seeks to provide investors with:

For more market trends, visitETF Trends.

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Robotics, AI Working Hand-in-Hand Will Propel Disruptive ETFs - ETF Trends

Editors Note: Oliver Mitchell is a Venture Partner at ff Venture Capital. Augean Robotics is a portfolio company of ff Venture Capital.

It spanned over 120 feet and took up a considerable area inside the already overpacked robotics section of the Las Vegas Convention Center. It left many wondering, What on earth is a tractor doing at CES?

Ever the since the acquisition of the artificial intelligence startup Blue River Technologies for $305 million, John Deere has been betting its future on data-driven agriculture. Explaining the presence of the enormous green combine on the show floor, Laurel Caes of John Deere declared, Its a great chance for those in the tech industry to visit with them and to learn more about how their food is produced and the important role technology plays and will continue to play in putting food on their tables.

I hosted Charles Andersen, CEO of Augean Robotics, last month at RobotLab to dig into the agritech market. Andersen worked for John Deeres largest competitor, Case New Holland (CHNi), after business school and knows the industry from the ground up as child of multigenerational farmers. After analyzing Blue River and the wider unmanned marketplace for CHNi, he concluded that autonomy is a force for new market disruption within agriculture, meaning that it is a force best commercialized by startups, so I decided to start a robotics company focused on agriculture.

Augean Robotics, one of The Robot Reports 2019 Startups to Watch, is one of the few systems actually working in the fields, while other upstarts are still tinkering indoors. Andersen exclaimed, Roughly two million US farms produce about $400 billion in revenue annually on a revenue basis, half of output is crops, and half is livestock.

In his opinion, livestock and grain productions are already on track to becoming fully automated. Livestock production is often fairly mechanized and in some cases automated (robotic milking parlors for example). Meanwhile, about one quarter of US farm output is grains corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. and other field crops like cotton these crops are very mechanized, with little in the way of labor in their production this is where Deere, CNHi, Kubota, AGCO, and others focus their marketing and R&D dollars building bigger/better tractors, combines, sprayers, etc.

This leaves speciality crop production (e.g., berries, orchards, and vegetables), which accounts for 88% of labor, as the low-hanging fruit for disruption. Andersen painted a portrait of aging farmers struggling with increasing overhead and razor-thin margins, forcing many owners to sell their family estates and move production to Central and South America.

Overall, there is rising demand for food with growing global population the irony of rising population is that as we have more people on the planet we have fewer farmers and fewer people looking to work for farmers. Thus, inputs across the board, from labor to water to fertilizer to machinery, are increasingly expensive and scarce, and generally speaking, growers are looking to do more with less.

Based on Andersens remarks, robotics is more than the newest equipment: it could be the savior of the US agrarian economy.

While many financial analysts have projected uber growth for agritech, the present reality is stymied by long sale cycles and difficult operating environments.

On the challenges side, the average age of a US farmer is 58, and these rising ages correlate with consolidation and an ever-smaller number of larger operators, Andersen said. Simultaneously, the conditions are often very challenging for autonomy, with the lighting, weather, field variability, and harshness that robots must face and handle consistently over and over again, the diversity of each industry makes finding industries with large TAMs difficult, and developing solutions that scale from one industry to another, is quite difficult.

At the same time, the opportunities could be larger than the other areas of autonomy as unmanned farm vehicles are able to immediately navigate around workers without regulations, pedestrians and other obstacles.

Rather than replacing humans, Augean Robotics approach is to alleviate todays agronomy inefficiencies by augmenting farmhands with mechanical donkeys called Burros.

We are doing something different, boasted Andersen, taking a stepped or phased approach towards full autonomy, beginning with a collaborative robotic platform called Burro that helps people work more productively today, collects tons of data, over time can be modularly expanded towards fully autonomous farming in a variety of different settings, and which we can get into the market today, not 5 years from now.

After observing how table grapes were picked and collected, Andersen launched a self-driving wheelbarrow to autonomously steer through vineyard rows as a shopping cart for harvesters.

Augean Robotics Burro robot. | Credit: Augean Robotics

Weve found that, like Kiva Systems in Amazon Warehouses, if you automate in-field transit you can enable people doing high-value/high-dexterity work like picking to be much more productive, Andersen said. A crew of 10 people harvesting table grapes with one of our robots running them back and forth can pick 40% more fruit per day, and the payback on one of our robots is accordingly just 30 and 40 days.

Long term he hopes to translate his success in table grapes to other labor-intensive crops such as berries and orchard fruits. In fact, his biggest worry for Augean Robotics being a startup is scaling his team to keep up with demand.

Every grower that buys our robots starts asking about five other use cases, often in different crops, that we didnt imagine our Burros going in to, and we have to ensure that our autonomy functions consistently and reliably everywhere, he said.

Andersen imagines a robotic herd shaping into a complete farming logistics platform over the next few years,

In 5 years, I see our Burro robots forming the core API for many of the future autonomous tasks people would like in specialty crops. By mastering the process of moving from A to B in complex farming settings, with a powerful and modular autonomous platform, I believe we are building a tool carrying platform that can enable autonomous picking, pruning, weeding, spot spraying, and a host of other tasks.

Andersens vision is embraced by many other roboticists that see a convoy of logistical solutions from the farm to the table. Last month, I was introduced to RoboJuice, a tasty invention by juice bar proprietor Mikalai Sakhno.

In the words of RoboJuice CEO Igor Nefedov, I realize that the automation of the food is an inevitable future and I wanted to participate in the change. He added, our smoothies will be cheaper, higher quality and little wait.

In light of the recent spat of robo-downturns, including Zume Pizza, Creator and CafeX, society might not be ready to turn over the kitchen to the bots. Nefedov retorted, were using human-like robots because its scientifically proven that people prefer robots that look like them people will eventually create an emotional connection that will drive repeat customers.

RoboJuice is still in building mode planning to open a first kiosk to showcase its franchise concept later this year. In the meantime, on a busy Vegas evening at CES last month I passed a completely empty automated bar, Tipsy Robot. Asking the hostess whats good, she responded the casinos nightclub, as the bartender there makes a mean mojito.

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Augean Robotics: mechanizing food production from farm to table - Robot Report

Artificial intelligence is entering our lives in many ways on our smartphones, in our homes, in our cars. These systems can help people make appointments, drive and even diagnose illnesses. But as AI systems continue to serve important and collaborative roles in peoples lives, a natural question is: Can I trust them? How do I know they will do what I expect?

Explainable AI (XAI) is a branch of A.I. research that examines how artificial agents can be made more transparent and trustworthy to their human users. Trustworthiness is essential if robots and people are to work together. XAI seeks to develop A.I. systems that human beings find trustworthy while also performing well to fulfill designed tasks.

At the Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning, and Autonomy at UCLA, we and our colleagues are interested in what factors make machines more trustworthy, and how well different learning algorithms enable trust. Our lab uses a type of knowledge representation a model of the world that an A.I. uses to interpret its surroundings and make decisions that can be more easily understood by humans. This naturally aids in explanation and transparency, thereby improving trust of human users.

In our latest research, we experimented with different ways a robot could explain its actions to a human observer. Interestingly, the forms of explanation that fostered the most human trust did not correspond to the learning algorithms that produced the best task performance. This suggests performance and explanation are not inherently dependent upon each other optimizing for one alone may not lead to the best outcome for the other. This divergence calls for robot designs that takes into account both good task performance and trustworthy explanations.

In undertaking this study, our group was interested in two things. How does a robot best learn to perform a particular task? Then, how do people respond to the robots explanation of its actions?

We taught a robot to learn from human demonstrations how to open a medicine bottle with a safety lock. A person wore a tactile glove that recorded the poses and forces of the human hand as it opened the bottle. That information helped the robot learn what the human did in two ways: symbolic and haptic. Symbolic refers to meaningful representations of your actions: for example, the word grasp. Haptic refers to the feelings associated with your bodys postures and motions: for example, the sensation of your fingers closing together.

First, the robot learned a symbolic model that encodes the sequence of steps needed to complete the task of opening the bottle. Second, the robot learned a haptic model that allows the robot to imagine itself in the role of the human demonstrator and predict what action a person would take when encountering particular poses and forces.

It turns out the robot was able to achieve its best performance when combining the symbolic and haptic components. The robot did better using knowledge of the steps for performing the task and real-time sensing from its gripper than using either alone.

Now that the robot knows what to do, how can it explain its behavior to a person? And how well does that explanation foster human trust?

To explain its actions, the robot can draw on its internal decision process as well as its behavior. The symbolic model provides step-by-step descriptions of the robots actions, and the haptic model provides a sense of what the robot gripper is feeling.

In our experiment, we added an additional explanation for humans: a text write-up that provided a summary after the robot has finished attempting to open the medicine bottle. We wanted to see if summary descriptions would be as effective as the step-by-step symbolic explanation to gain human trust.

We asked 150 human participants, divided into four groups, to observe the robot attempting to open the medicine bottle. The robot then gave each group a different explanation of the task: symbolic, step-by-step, haptic arm positions and motions, text summary, or symbolic and haptic together. A baseline group observed only a video of the robot attempting to open the bottle, without providing any additional explanations.

We found that providing both the symbolic and haptic explanations fostered the most trust, with the symbolic component contributing the most. Interestingly, the explanation in the form of a text summary didnt foster more trust than simply watching the robot perform the task, indicating that humans prefer robots to give step-by-step explanations of what theyre doing.

The most interesting outcome of this research is that what makes robots perform well is not the same as what makes people see them as trustworthy. The robot needed both the symbolic and haptic components to do the best job. But it was the symbolic explanation that made people trust the robot most.

This divergence highlights important goals for future A.I. and robotics research: to focus on pursuing both task performance and explainability. Only focusing on task performance may not lead to a robot that explains itself well. Our lab uses a hybrid model to provide both high performance and trustworthy explanations.

Performance and explanation do not naturally complement each other, so both goals need to be a priority from the start when building A.I. systems. This work represents an important step in systematically studying how human-machine relationships develop, but much more needs to be done. A challenging step for future research will be to move from I trust the robot to do X to I trust the robot.

For robots to earn a place in peoples daily lives, humans need to trust their robotic counterparts. Understanding how robots can provide explanations that foster human trust is an important step toward enabling humans and robots to work together.

Mark Edmonds is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and Yixin Zhu is a postdoctoral scholar in computer science, both at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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A New Study Finds People Prefer Robots That Explain Themselves - Smithsonian.com

The ongoing technological odyssey of robots and their acceptance into retail stores has given way to some interesting observations. Timing is everything is an ironic truth.

In my early days, developing a robotic solution for retail and defining its roadmap, I would say it was the beginning of embracing the technology and its presence to pave the way for adoption. There was reluctance and worry of what image a robot solution would project in stores; would it take away jobs? Interfere with and affect their shoppers? etc. Concerns faded away as developments progressed and time passed. Some even humanized the robot and gave it a name, such as Marty from Badger. Others used a more inconspicuous design, such as Tally from Simbe, to mold with the surroundings and provide less interference to shoppers and employees. There has been progress as solutions evolve, and competition from the likes of Amazon motivate retailers to integrate new technologies faster than usual. I call that advancement and realization maturity.

The road to automating retail stores with robots, as with any changing technology, will be prolonged and challenging. Any paradigm shift for retailers and everyone in their ecosystem requires management and leadership. Understandably, typical startup challenges can lead to costly delays. Add the multiple, significant components needed to build a robotic solution for each retailer, and you compound these challenges that can create a recipe for disaster. The components are:

All the current players have achieved various levels of success in accurately, repeatedly, and reliably scanning retail shelves at scale. I believe they have gained reasonable reliability in autonomous navigation. Image processing is the most complex lengthy in effort and the bulk of the complete solution, along with scale challenges. We are still a distance from attaining 80% of a usable shelf compliance solution, but this is within reach more so for some.

Here is my perspective on where we are:

Bossa Nova recently announced plans to expand its Walmart deployment to 1,000 robots. Image: Bossa Nova Robotics

Bossa Nova Robotics Currently the longest-running company to bring realization to a robotic solution for retail and the apparent leader. Completing major milestones in installation of autonomous data collection robots in 350 Walmart stores and just receiving a commitment for an additional 650 stores to be completed by summer of 2020. This is great news and a sizable milestone that Bossa Nova can use in its next funding round. As Sarjoun Skaff, CTO of Bossa Nova puts it, This is a very complex solution and as we found out, there are no shortcuts. Everyone has to go through the same challenges to get here. We are focused on solving problems to deliver a scalable solution and providing true value to our customers

The 350-store mark has been long in the works and is a considerable accomplishment, we will stay attentive to the new 1,000-store milestone. Bossa Nova has the most sophisticated equipment designed compared to others. Building a solution with cost to scale has always been an issue for all. With the release of the new 2020 hardware, claims are made that it comes at lower cost. I believe this is an area of opportunity for Bossa Nova to break away and add additional retailer banners.

Simbe Robotics There is big news in Simbes raising $26 million in funding, and a partnership with SoftBank inventory financing to expedite deployment of their robots globally. Simbe believes they have the largest geographical deployment of their robots. Brad Bogolea, CEO of Simbe Robotics shared, We have been focused on operationalizing the data as a priority in getting ready to scale. We feel we have done a good job diversifying our customer base and making the solution work for all departments and partners, this puts us in a good position to grow to chain wide rollouts this year, announcements forthcoming

Simbe has presence in the U.S. at Schnucks and Giant Eagle, using the vision solution and now with Decathlon using the recently added RFID capabilities. They also have coverage in Europe, the UAE and Asia with notable large global retailers. This might prove to be a winning strategy, diversifying early on and capturing a wide group of the 250 global retailers, as they get ready to scale. I still look for larger store count rollout beyond the 50 stores publicly announced, and expansion of current installations at Schnucks and Giant Eagle. The recent money raised and SoftBank partnership to increase production efficiencies could give them the boost they need to mature their capabilities and scale. Simbe did not participate with a presence at NRF this year; with their current global retailer coverage this could be a strategy to go dark with heads down, using the latest infusion to build up their abilities and get ready for the next phase to scale, we will wait and see.

Badger Technologies Marty, a spill detection robot that is looking to integrate inventory scanning. Image: Badger Technologies

Badger Technologies I recognized this company early on for its accomplishment of building a spill detection solution for retail stores, in a short couple of years. Although less complex, they were able to scale it and deploy it to over 500 stores; Giant, Martins, and Stop and Shop. Tim Rowland, CEO of Badger Technologies says, We see a need for a multi-function robot, we were surprised by the demand for a combined spill detection and inventory data collection robot as we expand our discussion with retailers, we also notice retailers looking beyond the hype of the robot idea and to focus more on how to operationalize the data collected to improve efficiencies and shopping experiences.

I think Badger starting out with a spill detection machine is an advantage, getting experience testing in live environments, and monetizing early on to help go further without having to rely on constant money-raising efforts. It helps as well to be part of Jabil, a $26 billion manufacturing solutions provider. If the Badger/Jabil combo cannot bring manufacturing costs down, no one can. Badger Technologies has an impressive local seasoned team that works well together and has the feel-good sense of a small town in Kentucky coming together and getting it done. They are now testing Badger Retail Insight, a robot that addresses out of stock, planogram compliance, and price integrity issues, competing with Bossa Nova and others. The processing capability is the biggest challenge and is a one- to three-year effort to complete and achieve an acceptable compliance reporting functionality. This will be key to how fast the solution penetrates and wins market share. We will continue to observe how Badger matures, given its current tests with Walmart and a half-dozen other retailers globally.

Zippedi Zippedi has been stealthily building its solution capabilities, leveraging local university talent and getting reasonable store coverage in South America. Luis Vera, CEO of Zippedi shared, We have tried several approaches to bring a real solution to our customers, from fixed cameras to robots. I think with the current robotic solution capability and tools we provide the expanded retailer partners; we are minimizing the out of stock problem for them by allowing them to respond quicker to shelf conditions.

Zippedi has built a solution for the retail ecosystem to scale from the ground up. They capitalized on retail expertise from the leaderships previous venture, called SCOPIX, that provided video analytics for retailers to improve business operations, sales and profits. They validated the robotic solution in several retailers in grocery and home improvement across five countries. Now testing in several major U.S. retailers, we can look forward to seeing if their model will gain traction and expand.

Zebra Technologies Finally, the best kept secret that everyone knew is out. Zebra rolled out its intelligent automation solution at NRF called SmartSight, which features the EMA50 and has the advantage of integrating with its portfolio of Zebra mobile computers. Zebra has been providing retailers with store-level solutions for more than 50 years. Undoubtedly, they have a respectable size and a diverse set of retailers to introduce their solution and expand quickly. Rob Armstrong, vice president of portfolio marketing at Zebra Technologies commented, With the SmartSight solution integrated with the rest of our portfolio, we can prioritize the tasks as they are pushed to the store associates mobile computers increasing their availability to interact directly with shoppers. We feel confident our existing capabilities are strong enough to optimize replenishment, reduce out-of-stocks, and provide value around compliance while reassigning labor to higher value assignments that enhance the shopper experience.

Normally I would say this is a bit late to the party, but Zebra leveraging its heritage, infrastructure, portfolio, and reach might be the game changer. What Zebra lacks in agility because of its size, it makes it up with maturity, certainly a rare ingredient in the startup world of robots. Image processing and computer vision proficiencies could have gotten a boost as well from a recent acquisition of Cortexica, and an investment in Focal Systems. Although shelf insights are a more complex problem to solve, it is possible the new talent will help mature the solution. These are very interesting moves made recently by Zebra Technologies. We will watch closely how it all comes together over the next year.

Brain Corp and Savioke Brain Corp specializing in the robot operating system with its early success of implanting its technology into floor-scrubbing machines and successfully completing it at Walmart, is now collaborating with Savioke. Savioke is the maker of robots for hospitality. Together they are working on a shelf-scanning solution. Like Zebra, these are the early days and they will soon learn the complications of collecting and processing retail data at scale. The field is getting crowded, prospects of collaborating and simplifying efforts to accomplish fast results are growing.

All are progressing at different speeds, maturing their capabilities with differing models. No question about it, robots are here to stay, and will be a permanent moving fixture in every retail aisle. They will have various robot duties, providing real data to feed many solutions and finally making them usable. The future we dreamed about is here!

As these companies scale, the impact of robotics in retail will start to touch the whole ecosystem beyond obvious data collection efficiencies and labor savings. Retail will not be the same. Current solutions in retail will either be enhanced and made more effective or rendered obsolete. Regardless, this opens the door to countless possibilities that many in the industry long await. This realization occurs when robots reach the threshold of truly scaling and collecting data from the whole store in all stores as Danny Sacco, former retail leader at Nielsen, keeps reminding me. I agree and say, This is when the fun begins.

Editors note: This article originally appeared in Winsight Grocery Business

About the author: Georges Mirza has been ahead of trends developing retail/CPG market leading industry changing solutions. He led the charge and established the road map for robotic indoor data collection, image recognition and analytics for retail to address out of stock, inventory levels and compliance. Georges currently advises companies on how to strategize and prioritize their road maps for growth. Follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter or e-mail.

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Robots in retail: Assessing current progress and long-term vision - Robotics Business Review