SINGAPORE: – During the pandemic, it was hard for businesses in Singapore to find people to work for them. As a result, they are using robots more and more to do things like surveying construction sites and scanning library book shelves.
The city-state depends on foreign workers, but the number of them dropped by 235,700 between December 2019 and September 2021, according to the manpower ministry. The ministry says that COVID-19 restrictions have sped up “the pace of technology adoption and automation” by companies.
At a construction site in Singapore, a four-legged robot called “Spot,” which was made by the U.S. company Boston Dynamics, scans sections of mud and gravel to check on how the work is going. It sends the information back to the control room of the construction company Gammon.
Michael O’Connell, the general manager of Gammon, said that using Spot only required one human worker instead of the two that were needed to do the job by hand.
“Autonomous solutions that replace the need for people on-site are getting a lot of traction,” said O’Connell, who thinks that labor shortages in the industry made worse by the pandemic are here to stay.
In the meantime, Singapore’s National Library Board has put two robots on the shelves of one of its public libraries that can read the labels on 100,000 books per day, which is about 30 percent of the library’s collection.
Lee Yee Fuang, assistant director at the National Library Board, said, “Staff don’t have to read the call numbers on the shelves one by one, which cuts down on routine and hard work.”
According to a 2021 report by the International Federation of Robotics, Singapore has installed 605 robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers. This is the second-highest number in the world, after South Korea’s 932.
Robots are also being used to work with customers. In more than 30 metro stations, for example, robots will soon be making coffee for people.
Keith Tan, the CEO of Crown Digital, which made the barista robot, said that it helped solve the “biggest pain-point” in the food and beverage industry, which was finding people to work there. It also created well-paid jobs to help automate the industry.
But some people who tried the service still wanted to talk to a real person.
“We always want to have some sort of human touch,” said Ashish Kumar, a commuter, as he sipped a drink made by a robot.