The extreme spread of coronavirus infected 18,486,295 people globally, and claimed more than 698,396 lives so far. Many healthcare workers and researchers are striving to put an end to this global pandemic.

Many humanoid robots are replacing human beings across the world to ensure social distancing, making the work less stressful for these health professionals.

In the recent times, India has witnessed the rise of these robotics start-ups to help in places like hospitals, thereby minimizing human intervention and paving the way for the use of machine to carry out tasks such as sanitizing hospitals and to deliver food and medicines to the infected patients.

A report from YourStory lists few such humanoid robots invented by Indian startups that are battling COVID-19.

C-Astra, Mitra, and RoboDoc by Invento Robotics
Invento Robotics – a Bangalore based robotic company, founded by Balaji Vishwanathan, Mahalakshmi Radhakrushnan, and Bharath Kumar in 2016, helps automate customer engagement in banks, airports, restaurants, and other places. The startup has now taken a step forward to put it’s contribution in the fight against Covid-19.

In April this year, the startup launched Invento C-Astra, a robot which helps screen patients and to disinfect common areas. The autonomous mobile unit can move around lobbies, hallways, and can sanitise rooms. According to the startup, the robot makes use of disinfecting UV-C lamps to disinfect a room completely in just three to four minutes. The robot is currently being used in hotels to disinfect rooms, and is also being used at Apollo Hospitals, etc.

Its commander robot, Mitra, was designed for customer engagement and alerts about the arrival of visitors. With the current COVID-19 crisis, it has been modified with the following features – scans temperatures of patients, collects necessary details of patients like their name, phone number, and picture, and even sets up a video call with the doctor for further diagnosis.

In order to help the doctors from contracting the virus, another robot called RoboDoc was introduced. This can move around the hospital autonomously, and it takes doctors inside COVID wards virtually, reducing their physical movement. It also scans temperature and other vitals of patients, and collects and feeds the data (their temperature, diet, etc.,) to the computer. Apart from this, the robot can also carry load of up to two kilograms. In short, RoboDoc is specially designed for healthcare sector.

Other inventions like RoboDiCaprio, RoboJulia, RoboNano, and RoboElf by Milagrow are also in practice. The high use and importance of technology has paved it’s way in this global destruction. As a result, COVID-19 brings increased visibility to the role of Robotics.