To make lemonade out of the early days of the pandemic lockdown, we hosted several virtual brainstorming sessions to rethink how and what robots could bring value to everyday life.
My proposal was that our robot is essentially a 3D positioning tool: as the robot moves through a building it can provide value by passively monitoring the Air. We deployed this service to focus on airborne contaminants and pollutants (given the pandemic and recent wildfires). However, I stressed another important value would be to measure air currents and temperatures throughout the building and across days/seasons to better optimize HVAC for hot/cold spots etc… The motivation being that Heating/Cooling of buildings accounts for something like 25% of global CO2 emissions!
To continue with this concept that our robot brings value simply as a 3D sensor positioning tool, we could monitor occupancy and human traffic patterns to better forecast ie. the Meal service load to better conserve food and staff. Aside from understanding patterns, the robot could provide value simply by seeing and notifying if things are out of place, need to be restocked, spills/building hazards, etc…
We ended up deploying Air-Quality-Monitoring as one of our few selective services, however I’d still like to demo several of the other values!
