B4| Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
nuclear-power plants and other
hazardous environments.
Mr. Nielsen isn’t the only innova-
tor shipping to eager customers
right now. As startups, the compa-
nies I talked to won’t disclose exact
quantities, but the numbers remain
small, in the dozens or hundreds
range, not the thousands or tens of
thousands they might be able to
ship if they were already producing
at scale.Nor is it clear how robust this
market will be. Like America’s
poorly maintained reserve of emer-
gency ventilators or woefully insuf-
ficient stockpile of masks and per-
sonal protective equipment, it’s
possible that once the threat has
passed, demand for these technolo-
gies will decline precipitously.
Jenny Lee, a 15-year veteran of
venture-capital firm GGV Capital
and an investor in Avidbots, saysRobots GoWhere Humans Fear toTread
A robotic army is being deployed in the virus fight to radiate surfaces, sanitize floors, scan for fevers and enforce mask-wearing
KEYWORDS|CHRISTOPHER MIMS
EXCHANGE
All over the world,
hundreds of engi-
neers, scientists and
software developers
are at work building a
robotic army with a
bold mission: to help
prevent the spread of coronavirus.
There are robots bedecked with
lamps that bathe surfaces in radia-
tion, robots with enough autonomy
to safely coexist with humans while
sanitizing floors 24/7, robots that
can scan for fevers and enforce
mask-wearing, even robots that
spew antimicrobial gas in outdoor
spaces. (That approach, scientists
say, is probably futile.)
Importantly, many of these ro-
bots are already being used to enter
environments before humans do, al-
lowing them to prevent infection
not only of patients and medical
personnel, but potentially also
front-line cleaning staff.
At Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky
International Airport, known as
CVG, passengers are sparse, but an
autonomous robot has been patrol-
ling terminals all day since the start
of 2020. The Avidbots Neo weighs
1,050 pounds when fully loaded but,
because of AI and a bank of cam-
eras and other sensors, can safely
operate around humans.
Brian Cobb, the airport’s chief in-
novation officer, says the Neo is ca-
pable of disinfecting and not merely
cleaning, since it can dispense a so-
lution of germ-killing fluid from one
tank and suck it up into a second
one, to be disposed of later.
Other robots that were never in-
tended for disinfection with chemi-
cals have been pressed into service.
As soon as it became clear an out-
break was brewing in Wuhan,
UBTech Robotics, based in Shen-
zhen, China, began a crash R&D
program to modify some of its ex-
isting robots to battle coronavirus.
On one, the Atris outdoor security
robot, engineers attached a system
to spray disinfectant in public
places. This has become a common
anti-coronavirus practice in China,
but scientists say there’s little evi-
dence it does anything, and can
even be dangerous, since it involves
filling the air with a dilute solution
of lung-irritating bleach.
Lethal Light
Another approach to disinfecting
with robot that, by contrast, is
backed by decades of research, is
the use of high-intensity UV light in
indoor spaces, says Benjamin Tan-
ner, chief executive of Austin,
Texas-based Microchem Laboratory,
which tests antimicrobial technolo-
gies for registration with the Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency.
For years, hospitals have used
high-frequency UVC light, a kind of
UV light that is dangerous to hu-
mans and lethal to microbes, to
sanitize rooms. No one can be in
the room when it’s in use. Depend-
ing on the power of the bulb, a
cluster of UVC-emitting lamps
wheeled into a room can do the job
in anywhere from 10 minutes to an
hour. These systems have the ad-
vantage of reaching many surfaces
that cleaning staff tend to forget,
says Dr. Tanner.
UVC light also has a particular
talent for killing airborne microbes.
This could be especially important
for the current pandemic if it turns
out that, as many scientists suspect,
a major way coronavirus is trans-
mitted might be when people
breathe in particles wafting about
indoor spaces.
FROM TOP: UVD ROBOTS; CINCINNATI/NORTHERN KENTUCKY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT; UBTECH; YOUIBOTA UV-light robot
disinfects an ICU.One disadvantage of using light
is that it requires a human to enter
the room—between cycles, of
course—to move the UVC-emitting
tubes from one position to another,
so all surfaces in a room receive the
maximum dosage of radiation. A
handful of companies are trying to
address this issue by using these
lights, in a way safe for humans, on
top of autonomous robots that can
rove about public spaces, shining
their baleful glow all over every-
thing, destroying viruses, bacteria
and fungi alike.
One such company, UVD Robots,
launched in Denmark in 2014 and
started selling its robots in 2018. It
now sells robots in nearly 50 coun-
tries. Since February, hospitals in
hot spots in China have been using
its technology. Demand for the com-
pany’s UVC-disinfecting robots has
exploded since December, putting
the company on track
to deliver two to
three times as many
robots as it had origi-
nally projected in
2020, says CEO Per
Juul Nielsen.
These robots
aren’t complicated by
the standards of au-
tonomous vehicles,
but they are able to
move through hospi-
tals and clean rooms
with minimal human
oversight. This has
allowed hospitals—
and increasingly,
other facilities like
warehouses, prisons
and offices—to disin-
fect more often than
they would with hu-
mans, sometimes as
frequently as every
few hours.First to Enter
A new protocol for the age of coro-
navirus being used by some cus-
tomers of UVD Robots involves
sending their robot into rooms after
coronavirus-positive patients have
exited but before anyone else has
entered. By conducting a prelimi-
nary sterilization before the room is
cleaned, it’s operating in a manner
not so different from robots that
have in the past entered wreckedthat coronavirus has put a spotlight
on robotics and automation in gen-
eral. Many robotics companies in
China, for example, quickly adapted
general-purpose autonomous ro-
bots, typically used to patrol offices
or move goods indoors, to do things
like roam hospitals with sensors to
detect people’s temperature, or to
carry UV lamps.Is Your Mask On?
In addition to its disinfectant-spray-
ing robot, UBTech outfitted two
other models of its enterprise ro-
bots, the Cruzr and Aimbot, with
thermal cameras to “see” if some-
one is running a fever. They also
have object-recognition algorithms
that allow them to determine
whether a person is wearing a
mask. Deployed in hospitals, they’re
able to navigate the halls autono-
mously, reminding people to wear
masks and flagging people who
might be sick. The Cruzr model also
has the ability to act as a concierge,
giving incoming patients a two-way
video connection to a remote doc-
tor who might conduct their initial
intake assessment.
One challenge for
the new market for
“clean tech” is that
all these robots
might not prove to
be cost effective
compared with solu-
tions that aren’t as
fancy. Cleaning hard
surfaces where vi-
ruses spread, like
door handles and el-
evator buttons, still
requires a level of
dexterity and ma-
neuverability that
only humans pos-
sess. But Ms. Lee is
hopeful that compa-
nies will continue to
work on robots with
smaller form factors
and more autonomy.
Another concern
is that a great deal
of research on the
effectiveness of all
of these technolo-
gies remains to be conducted. UV-
light systems, in particular, vary a
great deal in how effective they are
and are lightly regulated, says Mi-
crochem Laboratory’s Dr. Tanner.
“There are manufacturers who have
done no testing of their own, and
it’s a little bit of buyer beware on
the UV market,” he adds. Some
firms have used research to show
their systems are very effective, not
just at killing germs but actually re-
ducing infection rates in hospitals.
At Microchem Laboratory, which
evaluates a whole host of antimi-
crobial technologies, from disinfec-
tants to UV lights, Dr. Tanner is
now receiving 15 to 20 inquiries a
day from existing and new custom-
ers that have technology they want
his lab to evaluate. Before coronavi-
rus, he got only one or two inqui-
ries a day.
John Rhee, general manager of
UBTech Robotics North America, is
betting that the extent of the coro-
navirus pandemic has woken up the
world to the need for long-term
preparedness.
“We talk about flattening the
curve, but the need to be vigilant
and have increased monitoring and
have measures in place to decrease
transmission are things that organi-
zations both public and private will
have to take seriously for a very
long time,” he says.A Cruzr, above, flags people with a fever or no mask. Below, a Youibot robot in China.Avidbots Neo robots have been cleaning the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport since the start of the year.