The Meaning of 10,000 Tasks
In late November 2020 we reached an exciting milestone for our robot Moxi, achieving 10,000 tasks performed in service of our flagship hospital partner, Medical City Healthcare. More exciting than that milestone is the speed in which we reached it: most of those 10,000 tasks were completed in just the last 3 months due to new sites coming online and workload increasing due to Covid-19.
This is a proud milestone for all of us at Diligent Robotics, especially as we reflect on how far we’ve come. The photo above is one I like to go back to at moments like these; back to the very beginning of developing our hospital robot, Moxi, to remember when Diligent was just two ambitious founders with seed funding, working out of our investor’s office and testing a robot arm on a table top in January of 2018. Back then, and still now, we maintain our big dreams of robots working side by side with people.
Soon after this photo was taken, we took our first prototype mobile manipulation robot to a simulation center in Austin, and proved that we could take a robot out of the lab and into the real world. We proved that we could have the robot up and running in 30 minutes from arrival, and succeeded in doing tests all day long. Looking back, that incredible milestone was one of so many crucial steps in building what Moxi is today, our hospital robot that’s just completed more than 10,000 tasks!
Throughout 2018-19, we hit more major product milestones with a series of research trials in hospitals across Texas including Houston Methodist, Texas Health Dallas, UTMB Galveston, and Dell Children’s Medical Center. What a thrill to work alongside these innovative nursing leaders as they opened their doors to our new and exciting robot! They partnered with us to test an incredible multitude of activities and tasks so their frontline staff could put Moxi to work and they could spend more time at the bedside of their patients
During these research trials Moxi performed tasks 22 hours a day, seven days a week for 4-5 weeks at a time. That alone was such an incredible achievement and, reminiscing now , it’s amazing to think that running for a whole month was something we had never seen happen! It was another major milestone toward proving we could deliver a product that functioned in the field so gracefully. We put our research into practice and our assumptions proved true.
Fast forward to 2020 and our robots are working 22/7, and have been installed and running for months on end, without interruption We are seeing these robots used to their max capacity, and hearing heartfelt thank yous from the frontline hospital staff about how much Moxi improves their workdays. This genuine feedback expresses to us that what we’ve built is truly needed by those we serve and form and function are marrying in the most beautiful way.
THIS is exactly what we imagined when sitting with that arm on the table so many years ago, and THIS is why we keep doing what we do.