A hospital introduced a robot to help nurses. They didn't expect it to be so popular

But Moxi, which was designed and built by the Austin-based company Diligent Robotics, isn't trying to act like a nurse. Instead, Diligent Robotics founders Andrea Thomaz and Vivian Chu have designed their robot to run the approximately 30% of tasks nurses do that don't involve interacting with patients, like running errands around the floor or dropping off specimens for analysis at a lab. "We're helping them augment their staff," says Thomaz, who formerly was a robotics professor at UT Austin and Georgia Tech, where she ran the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab. "It's hard to argue that we're taking anyone's job. Everyone is trying to make the nurses they have go further." Moxi is equipped with a robotic arm and a set of wheels on its base, and can be preprogrammed to run errands around the hospital.