Diligent Robotics co-founder and CEO Andrea Thomaz shared insights into the company’s Moxi robot, milestones, and plans.
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Every day, Moxi performs dexterous tasks like pressing elevator buttons or opening doors. | Source: Diligent Robotics
Last week, Diligent Robotics Inc. announced that its Moxi mobile manipulator surpassed 1 million deliveries across its entire fleet. Andrea Thomaz, the co-founder and CEO and co-founder of the Austin, Texas-based company, shared insights with The Robot Report into its journey to that milestone, its latest technology, and where it plans to go next.
Moxi completed its millionth delivery as part of pharmacy run to an outpatient infusion center at a hospital in Chicago.
“That’s one of our more common workflows these days. A lot of hospitals have an infusion clinic for people to come and do their chemotherapy treatments at the hospital, but a lot of times, it’s outpatient,” Thomaz said. “You come in, get your treatment, and leave, and they want to make that as seamless as possible. They want it to be comfortable. They want it to be fast.”
In this hospital, the pharmacy is far from the infusion center. Before Moxi, nurses would have to spend much of their time walking from the pharmacy to the infusion center to deliver crucial medicine. Here, the goal is to get the medicine to patients as quickly as possible so they can start their treatments.
“We hear a lot from the infusion clinic teams that use Moxi that they just love seeing the efficiency,” Thomaz said. “They love seeing that people can get in the chair and get their meds started right away.”
Moxi gathers an abundance of data
“Our robots are continually learning about being mobile and manipulating in a busy human environment,” said Thomaz. Surpassing 1 million picks means the company‘s visual language models (VLMs) are always improving, she added.
“With all of the data that we’ve been able to run through those models, we’ve gotten really good at being able to do semantic scene understanding in a busy human, indoor environment, which is different than a lot of the videos you’ll see of autonomous cars and drones,” Thomaz continued. “Those are the ones you usually see the labeled output from semantic scene understanding.”
While Diligent Robotics is heavily investing in artificial intelligence, it is taking a cautious approach.
“You have to think about, where do we apply AI correctly? Where is it actually going to help?” Thomaz said. “For action generation and control, some of these models that are more ‘black box.’ You really have to ask yourself, ‘What’s the right place to pull out that kind of trajectory planner I was using before, and replace it with a model?’”
“You have to have a model that’s seen enough data, it’s accurate enough, you’ve captured enough edge cases that you can really have those safety controls in place,” she added.
This is why the company established its AI Advisory Board, which will provide insights into the latest AI research.
“It’s interesting to talk with five research labs trying different ways to, say, push an elevator button,” Thomaz said. “My takeaway is that all of the academic advisors are blown away by the complexity of real environments.”
Human-robot interaction takes center stage
Moxi No. 119 completes Diligent’s 1 millionth delivery at a Chicago hospital. | Source: Diligent Robotics
One element of Moxi that sets it apart from other mobile manipulators is that it is working with people today. According to Thomaz, each delivery the robot performs involves interacting with people in some capacity.
“What’s really interesting to me, with my background and expertise is in human-robot interaction, is putting these embodied AI model robots into busy human environments where they have to directly interact with people,” Thomaz said.
Moxi is constantly getting on and off elevators, going through busy hallways, and collecting people’s badge information to ensure that every delivery is going to the right place.
“We’ve learned that you have to have this flexibility in order to seamlessly fit into clinical workflows,” Thomaz said. “I can’t really imagine coming to a hospital with a product and saying, ‘Here’s how you have to use it, it has to do this for you, and you have to do that.’”
While Moxi is currently interacting with healthcare staffers, Thomaz said many hospitals are interested in using it for more patient-facing tasks.
Diligent Robotics is looking into expanding the robot‘s capabilities to include non-clinical deliveries, like bringing pillows or water to patients. These capabilities will also open the door for eventually putting Moxi into different care environments.
“If we go from hospitals to assisted living, for example, then you start to see a very interesting trajectory where a company could go from hospitals to structured nursing homes to eventually the home,” noted Thomaz. “So I personally think there are a lot of companies going out and going straight to humanoids for the home. But, you know, we’ve kind of taken this very concerted path to become a trusted partner in healthcare.”
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Diligent prepares to scale in 2025
Right now, Diligent Robotics is focused on making sure Moxi can be as helpful as possible in hospitals. This focus on operations and support is attractive to the company’s customers, said Thomaz.
“As people start coming into the space, [our customers] are very interested in the fact that Diligent only has hospital customers,” she said. “We’re focused on building robots that fit within clinical workflows, and that instills a lot of trust.”
“We’re certainly trying to scale as quickly as we can while still maintaining that trust and having great client interactions,” Thomaz added. “So we focused a lot on operations in 2024 and building out the teams and infrastructure that are going to allow us to scale more quickly and add velocity to that in 2025.”
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