Singapore strengthens the deployment of robots to serve people after the pandemic

After having difficulty finding staff during the pandemic, more and more businesses in Singapore are turning to deployment robot to do a variety of jobs, from surveying construction sites to scanning library shelves, according to Reuters.

According to Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, the country relies heavily on foreign labor resources, but the number of such workers here has decreased by about 235,700 people between December 2019 and September 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. . But besides that, COVID-19 and disease prevention measures have helped accelerate the “speed of technology adoption and automation” of Singapore companies during this period.

At a construction site in Singapore, a four-legged robot called “Spot”, made by the US company Boston Dynamics, is sweeping the mud and gravel sections to check the progress of the work, data will be provided. back to the control room of the construction company Gammon. Gammon’s general manager, Michael O’Connell, said the use of Spot will save manpower by more than half compared to before.

“Replacing the need for on-site manpower with automated solutions is gaining real traction,” said O’Connell.

Meanwhile, the National Library of Singapore has introduced two robots tasked with scanning labels on 100,000 books, or about 30% of the library’s collection, each day.

Lee Yee Fuang, assistant director at the National Library of Singapore, said the robots have helped library staff not have to read the labels on each book, a job that requires a lot of time and manpower when the number of books is limited. There are more and more books in the library.

Robots are also being used for customer reception tasks in Singapore, with more than 30 metro stations set up to have robots make coffee for commuters.

Keith Tan, CEO of Crown Digital, the company that created the coffee-making robot, said the robot is helping to solve the “biggest problem” in the food and beverage industry, which is finding employees. . However, some users who try the service still crave human interaction.

“We’ve always wanted a little bit of a human,” said office worker Ashish Kumar, sipping a drink made by the robot.

Currently, in Singapore, 605 robots are installed for every 10,000 employees in the manufacturing industry, the second highest number globally, after 932 of Koreaaccording to a 2021 report by the International Federation of Robots.