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The Covid-19 pandemic is unfolding at a time of significant advances in urban robotics and there is an opportunity for these technologies to help manage the covid-19 virus and reduce the need for human contact in selected areas of urban interaction.

Effective management of covid-19 requires strategies like physical distancing, lockdowns, and quarantining to prevent transmission of the virus between humans. But strategies are also needed to facilitate the movement of people and material, to maintain essential flow and sustain human life. 

Dr Aidan While, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, thinks robotics and AI have an important role to play in this arena. 

Dr While’s research examines how responses to covid-19 have broadened the landscape of robotic infrastructure and asks whether urban robotics could provide a viable solution to public health and urban management challenges. 

“When we talk about urban robotics, what we’re referring to is bringing robotics and automation out of the factories, labs and closed environments into the public realm; into cities and societies. It could be thinking about how robotics might enhance transport, service delivery or the management of cities generally,” said Dr While.

Before the pandemic, there were major advances in real-world applications of robotics, evidenced by the rapid development of drones, driverless vehicles and service robots. In fact, one of the most significant advances in robotic applications has been in ‘hostile’ environments where it is difficult to function safely.

“Covid-19 is a prime example of how the public arena became a potentially challenging environment for us all,” said Dr While. “In many countries, one of the central actions of covid-19 management was to control movement and enforce lockdowns through human policing and mobile phone-based tracking. Robotics and AI—including facial recognition software—are offering up new forms of territorial control in the sky, on the ground, and at entry points into buildings or different parts of the city.  

Relaxation to rules and regulations

“Prior to the pandemic, there were more regulations in place for robotics and AI applications, especially in terms of health and safety. This made it difficult for firms to demonstrate the potential of their technology and progress from the labs and factories. 

“Now, some of those regulations have been relaxed, and concerns about surveillance minimised, to allow for necessary experimentation during the crisis. There’s space for creating robotics and an active view that when planning for the future, considerations need to be made for how technology can assist in creating better assisted or augmented living.”

In San Francisco, for example, authorities banned robots and facial recognition on ethical principles, but some of those constraints have begun to be relaxed and rolled back due to the pandemic, and new ways of thinking about place and space. 

Dr While added: “There’s a lot less resistance from governments now, which actually take more active roles in these projects, and there seems to be a change in perspective from the public too, so there’s potentially a bigger opportunity for growth.” 

So why have perspectives and attitudes around robotics shifted so drastically in the time of the covid-19 pandemic? The key is minimising human contact in situations where there is risk to life. 

“On the one hand, robotics can be harnessed to minimise human contact when it is necessary for health and safety,” said Dr While, “but on the other hand, there’s an opportunity for monitoring society and policing without people, in the likes of track and trace.” 

“Even before the covid-19 pandemic, interest in working with robotics and AI to minimise human contact was gaining momentum. One area that urban robotics had already been tested on was in warfare, where drones, delivery robots and other specialised technology could replace human contact in the battlefield, reducing the risk of injury and death. 

“That same logic is starting to be applied to infrastructure in cities,” Dr While added, “and we want to consider how pandemic and post-pandemic planning can actually create space for experimentation with those technologies.”

Designing cities for the future

Dr While’s research focuses on robotic applications in infrastructure and creating societal change to augment everyday life. 

“When we think about infrastructure at a basic level, we tend to think of roads, buildings and other structures that help people live their lives. So in terms of robotics, it’s going back to the issue of how things move around or how things get delivered, for example, and thinking of how cities might be planned and designed for a better future,” Dr While said.  

As part of the research, Dr While and his team are looking to China, a country recognised for its exceptional capacity in robotics, autonomous systems and AI. 

“By 2019, China was leading the way with AI and robotics, especially in terms of facial recognition technologies to monitor and manage citizens,” said Dr While. “With the arrival of covid-19, the state, cities, and corporate partners repurposed existing AI and robotic applications to meet the demand of Covid-19 containment, through service delivery, surveillance, movement control and clinical care.”

The Chinese model of AI development is underpinned by ideas of the safe city (Artigas, 2017), a result of the growing use of facial recognition technologies to monitor and manage citizens in the public arena through a combination of CCTV and advanced AI. Building on these systems, the state, cities, and corporate partners readily repurposed existing AI and robotic applications to meet the demand of COVID-19 containment.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), China’s response was ‘perhaps the most ambiguous, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.’ 

Replacing humans in service delivery

In China, private sector firms have undertaken testing of ground and aerial robotics primarily for goods delivery, yet this is restricted in most countries by practical challenges in negotiating complex urban environments, regulatory limits, and high costs. 

Covid-19 has given China’s leading e-commerce and delivery firms (particularly JD.com and Meituan-Dianping) a mandate for autonomous deliveries to hospitals and residential compounds on public roads, and has also sparked expansion of drone use for medical transport and commercial freight deliveries, especially in quarantined areas, where previously drone use had been prohibited. 

Urban biometric surveillance

By 2019, many major Chinese cities had a sophisticated infrastructure for enhanced movement control in the public realm via security cameras linked to facial recognition. The processing of millions of Chinese citizens’ data is facilitated by extended AI capability, justified on the grounds of public safety and the efficient management of dense urban populations.

Covid-19 has led to a process of repurposing the existing camera surveillance system by pairing CCTV, facial recognition technologies, and thermal imaging for biometric screening to identify citizens with high temperatures. 

“Pandemic control via temperature sensing has arguably been a crude diagnosis, reminiscent of the problems with using airport detectors to identify SARS in 2003,” said Dr While. “However, in a context where any potential symptoms are treated with caution and control, the fusing of facial recognition and heat-sensing is a significant extension of biocontrol that prefigures a much wider sphere of future biometric surveillance.”

Digital movement control

The reopening of the city of Wuhan reflected a wider opening up of urban circulation in China at a time when many cities in Europe and North America were in various stages of lockdown. This was facilitated in China by a responsive colored QR code program as an automated filter to control physical mobility. 

Using smartphones to scan a barcode triggers users’ health code apps (via Alipay or WeChat), displaying users’ color-coded ranking. Only green code holders can obtain a 24-hour permit to access urban spaces. A red code requires supervised isolation, with domestic quarantine for a yellow code. 

While the technology has had its issues, the system gave the state enormous power to control social movement at a distance and without contact-based policing.

Robotic clinical care

Social robotics is set to transform healthcare in various domains, including new infrastructures of augmented and assisted living. With aging populations, healthcare is a significant area of urban robotics, albeit not always an area that is seen as part of urban politics. Equally, research on healthcare robotics had paid limited attention to the issue of pandemic control. 

The exposure of healthcare workers to covid-19 and their need to self-isolate has been a major concern, especially given the significant demands on intensive care. In China, AI-powered CT scanning of the lungs was a primary method for early diagnosis of the virus, reducing the time spent on diagnosing a case from 30 minutes to seconds. New applications included the clinical trial of a remote-controlled robot to collect throat swabs for testing. 

In the city of Hangzhou, doctors teleoperated a 5G-powered robot to conduct an ultrasound examination and diagnosis on a patient 700 km away in Wuhan. The growing adoption of AI and robotics in hospitals has arguably provided additional capacity for the extremely stretched health service despite concerns about their accuracy and data security.

Lessons learnt 

So what can we learn from China when it comes to developing robotics and AI applications for crisis situations, and in planning future cities? 

“There’s a lot of experimentation happening in different countries around the world, each with their own demands and challenges, but nothing seems to be joined up,” said Dr While. “I think it’s important for the UK to reflect on what’s happening elsewhere and understand what lessons can be drawn from other applications. There’s an opportunity for international sharing. 

“But our wider goal is to bridge the gap between policy and the robotics research community. We’ve been working closely with engineers and major robotics and tech firms to understand the restrictions they face and the requirements they have for facilitating robotics applications in the public arena.

“They need real world spaces to experiment and demonstrate the technology, but up until this point they haven’t had the space to prove that the tech will benefit the public in all kinds of ways.

“So our research is trying to bridge that divide between policy and research development and I think part of that work is bringing an urban perspective. So far government and tech firms have tended to focus on discrete technologies or applications rather than the wider planning and design of cities. So to provide an urban framework would help the UK to consider what robotics might mean for infrastructure and future planning. 

“The final element of our work is to put everything into an ethical framework, so we can try to anticipate some of the problems, the tensions and the challenges we may face in the robotics field, so governments can start to have a discussion about what is possible and plan for the future, especially when it comes to social control.” 

Dr While and his team are aiming to work with the UK government, local councils and robotics companies to work through the possibilities and challenges of bringing robotics and AI further into the public realm. The multidisciplinary team – including Professor Simon Marvin from the Urban Institute, Rachel Macrorie (University of Delft) and robotics engineers from the University of Leeds and York – has received funding from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council to build capacity around urban robotics in the UK.

The project has included companies such as the food delivery service, Ocado, which is developing robotic technology for use in its warehouses and externally in the UK and internally. For Dr While, Ocado is “one of the most interesting robotics research organisations in the UK” and it could be especially interesting for urban robotic development.

So how might robotics and AI be further embedded into our lives in the future? For Dr While, the most interesting and appropriate applications would be in transport and service delivery.

“The more interesting dimensions are in areas like independent living,” he said, “so rather than thinking about how we might replace existing ways of moving around, it’s about rethinking how the current systems could better support people with disabilities or other vulnerabilities. 

“So how can we augment and enhance quality of life? That’s the big question for me in terms of what robotics and AI could do. How could transport be delivered in more tailored ways, or how could delivery benefit a bigger variety of people living in the city? 

“It’s a big question, but we’re starting to uncover the possibilities.”

Find out more about Dr While’s research.