One of Linda Muniz’s newest colleagues is a robot that makes deliveries. On a recent morning, Muniz greeted the robot as it rolled up to the nursing station at El Camino Hospital in the Silicon Valley community of Mountain View, Calif., and announced its presence in a polite female voice.
“I call her ‘Tugette,'” says Muniz, who works in hospital admissions. The voice is about the only feminine part of this robot, which was developed by Aethon as part of a product line called Tug, which automatically transports food, medicine, and lab samples around hospitals. The robot looks like a cabinet attached to a giant vacuum cleaner. Muniz can unload Tugette’s cabinet, press a green button, and send the machine rolling to its next delivery.
While robots have been around for decades, they’ve mostly been used in manufacturing jobs considered too dangerous for humans. “Big robots were often behind fences, ” says Jeff Burnstein, president of the Robotic Industries Assn., a trade group in Ann Arbor, Mich., that promotes wider use of robots in industry. “Now, we’re seeing movement in making robots more intrinsically safe so they can work side-by-side with humans.”
Thanks to more advanced sensors and safety technology that can prevent them from injuring people, robots are moving beyond factories and into different types of work. As robots and workers interact more extensively, manufacturers are coping with dramatic expectations from their human counterparts and trying to moderate employees’ emotional responses by building a measure of cuteness into the machines. “There’s a cultural element that’s helped keep robots out of the workplace,” says Larry Fisher, research director at market researcher ABI Research. Unlike the Japanese, who are more accepting when robots mix with people, Americans reflect greater conditioning from such movies as The Terminator and fear robots. “You’re not too anxious to…