Human and robots that involve across boundaries
Everyone, including essential workers who were engaged in health services or garbage collection in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, came to realize that there is a high risk of infection by using interfaces which involve physical contact, such as touch screens, doorknobs at entrances and exits, and elevator buttons in public facilities. In an attempt to overcome this situation, many start-ups consider that improving the public interfaces is a new business opportunity.
Robotics reduces and automates the tasks of essential works such as logistics, medical care and nursing care, and garbage collection. Even in situations where the warmth of human hands is so important such as the field of nursing care, the intervention of robots within the range of not putting people’s lives at risk will lead to the assurance of safety for both the caregivers and the people requiring care. The range of automation expands further such as in the logistics field. In situations where high versatility and flexibility are required, such as when handing over luggage to another person or handling fragile items, people themselves support the last one mile between human and robots. People notice that the complementary relationships between human and robots would change their lives for the better, so they naturally come to help robots.
Mechanization expands in the work areas that have been conducted by human hands. Among these work areas, the public transport networks are especially rebuilt drastically by being optimized for automated transportation and self-driving vehicles. People who have begun living along with the automated systems get a new lifestyle by creating an environment focusing on the movement of the robots, such as changing roads and sidewalks to make it easier for small automated-driving carts to move. The robots play a role of “supporting tasks that humans have difficulty in doing.” On the contrary, humans are “the existences that support the delicate work and flexible judgment that robots are not good at.” People come to think that the relationship in which humans and robots with different specialty fields cooperate with each other would open up a new kind of value.
In public spaces, when you open a door or operate an elevator, the most important thing is that you can operate them without touching. The devices carried by individuals such as smartphones become essential items to enable you to operate without touching. These devices keep your action history every time they are used in a public transportation, so they also play a role of ID (identification card). Therefore, these devices transform into tools taking an intermediate position since they can become both a private property and a public property. An eye-gaze input system and facial expression recognition technology are implemented in the cities that were reconstructed on the premise of non-contact, and you will be strongly aware of co-existence with the elderly people, people with disabilities, and people requiring nursing care who have some heavy burden in public spaces.
Non-contact operations generate the demands for a variety of equitable and easy-to-use interfaces that are not bound by physical and intellectual disabilities; thus, the interfaces become available in public spaces as public services. Furthermore, the “brain-machine interfaces” that operate machines using brain activities such as brain waves also become widespread. Machines and technologies are changing from the tools people use, to those they wear almost like a part of their body, and the idea of “people with no physical defects” is changing. Various interfaces appear one after another to connect between public spaces and individuals and meet the characteristics of each individual, like contact lenses that have functioned as a body expansion to supplement human eyesight. People feel a sense of equity in being free to choose an interface that expands their bodies, and a society in which everyone can participate without distinction will be realized.
