Hidden Challenges of Deploying Robots in the Real World
In the second half of 2024, Akara, the startup I co-founded, reached a major milestone: the first full handover of our autonomous robots at a hospital site. From this point every night our robot operate independently, disinfecting the hospital’s operating rooms without human supervision. Although we demonstrated the core functionality back in December 2020, it has taken years of iteration and development to reach this point.
Over this four year period, we’ve made significant changes to the hardware (now in its fourth iteration), refined the robot’s user interface, and improved its algorithms. However, the most significant challenge wasn’t the robot itself. The hard part was building the operating infrastructure needed to operationalize these robots in the real world. This crucial aspect is often overlooked but is essential for success.
In this series of posts, I’ll share some of the operational challenges we’ve faced and how we’ve tackled .