In hospitals across the US, patients and staff have become accustomed to a one-armed, four-foot high, friendly-looking white robot called Moxi going about its business. Nurses have been known to greet it with a “good morning”, a high five or even a hug. Its maker, Diligent Robotics, based in Texas, says Moxi feels like part of the team – but hospitals do not have to buy one outright. Instead, they rent it.
Moxi is among a growing number of robots available on a subscription or rental basis, a model the industry calls robotics-as-a-service. Service, maintenance and upgrades are bundled into the deal, and a human engineer sitting in a remote control room may take over if needed. “It lowers the expense and the outlay for the hospital because you're not paying for the full purchase up front,” said Todd Brugger, chief operating officer of Diligent Robotics. “Secondly, and I think more importantly, this tech is evolving very quickly… we're routinely evolving the software and capabilities of the robot.”
“US hospitals rent robots like Moxi to avoid high upfront costs and keep pace with rapidly evolving tech.”
The approach is spreading beyond hospital deliveries to robot bartenders, autonomous weeders for farms, and increasingly early humanoid models designed to behave and look like humans. Given humanoids are still a work-in-progress, they are typically rented for clearly defined tasks such as entertainment – a machine might dance, sing or serve guests at a wedding or corporate event.
Ethan Qi, a Beijing-based associate director at Counterpoint Research, said a humanoid dance routine is relatively simple to pull off: “You hire a real dancer to perform and video it. The video is then used to train the robot. Then the robot will know how to dance. But the engineer will still often go with the robot in case the environment or the platform isn't simple.”
One company pushing beyond entertainment is 1X, based in California. It plans to start shipping its home helper robot NEO later this year. “Early access” customers in the US can either pay $20,000 outright for their own robot, or $499 per month on a subscription basis. The pricing reflects a bet that renting – not buying – will become the norm for a technology that is evolving far too fast to own.