Sponsored column: How robots are changing the world

They are making significant impacts in industries such as healthcare, security and even household services.

The growing use of robotics should continue to support productivity, while the producers of robotic hardware and software should benefit from increasing demand.

The healthcare sector has seen particularly huge innovations. In 2006, the first purely robotic surgery was performed on a 34-year-old male with a heart disorder, but by 2015, Intuitive Surgical, a leading robotic-assisted surgery provider, was performing 652,000 robo-surgeries per year using its da Vinci Surgical System.

This figure continues to grow at a high rate, while robots are being used to help in various other ways within the sector. For example, the international medical humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders has recently begun to deliver tuberculosis vaccinations by drone in countries with poor infrastructure.

Having been used in the military for some time, robotics are also increasingly being used by police forces around the world. For example, police in Dallas first used robots armed with explosives to lethal effect when combatting terrorist activity in 2016. The level of technology being utilised is always increasing as well, with Korean police planning to use five-foot tall ‘robo-guards’ with 3D cameras to identify potential criminal behaviour at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeong-chang.

In the service industry, robots assist humans by performing duties that are distant, dull, dangerous or repetitive (such as household chores). Of the one million service robots estimated to be in use across the world, a quarter of them are in Japan. One of the most popular household robots is Roomba, an autonomous vacuum cleaner that operates using sensors. Studies have shown that people who own Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners can develop emotional attachments to them, often naming them!

More broadly, as the world’s population ages robots will be used to replace human workers. In Japan, which is at the forefront of the robotics industry, they are expected to replace 3.5 million workers by 2025. However, it should also be mentioned that as well as replacing workers, robots are creating employment; 300,000 people are already employed in the fast-growing industrial robotics sector and the robotics-servicing sector is anticipated to grow even faster than this.