In the popular "Futurama" TV series, one of the main robot characters was Bender. Among his favorite catch phrases was a call for his robotic companions to "kill all humans." It now looks like various biological agents – such as the coronavirus and others – may achieve that end ahead of any robot call to arms. In reality, it now appears that robots and artificial intelligence (AI) may help be one of the saviors of humanity against both natural disasters and our latest biological nemesis. Their new call to arms has become to "kill all viruses."

Merril Douglas paints a picture of a time in the near future when robots and humans will work side-by-side to help companies gain speed, increase accuracy, cut costs, and handle the grunt work. E-commerce sales continue to climb, forcing retailers to pick up the pace in their fulfillment and distribution centers," Douglas writes. "But these days, it's hard to find workers to keep product moving in any kind of warehouse e-commerce or otherwise." We're already seeing examples of robots being designed to take over the supply chain's least attractive tasks. "In some cases, robotic systems do this work entirely on their own, freeing humans for more complex functions," Douglas points out. "In other instances, bots collaborate with humans.

There is growing demand for more flexibility in factories and shops. Collaborative robotics, a sub-set of service robotics in labs, manufacturing and material handling, is where the action is today because co-bots are meeting these new demands, while caged legacy robots are not. Service and assistance robotics, with and without mobility, are an emerging and somewhat futuristic field, albeit one which is developing rapidly. Vision and tactile sensors, safety features, mobility, and simple, fast and intuitive robot training, are all playing important roles in many application areas. As robots can be trusted to safely work alongside humans and are relatively portable and easy to program, business managers, from all sized companies, begin to imagine uses within their labs, facilities, factories and shops – uses where robots and humans collaboratively work together to improve productivity and efficiency by using the robot where it is better than its human partners, and vice versa.