On 22 September 2020, C-NAPSE helped organise the 4th Lisbon Robotics Talk — held online under the title “Robotics and the Pandemic” — an initiative of the Lisbon Robotics Cluster, promoted by the Lisbon City Council.

Held at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, the event gathered research and industry experts to examine a pressing question: how were robots actually being used to address the impact of the pandemic, and how was the crisis reshaping investment and priorities in robotics?

What the pandemic taught us about robotics

COVID-19 turned a long-running thesis into an urgent one. When human proximity became a risk, robotics moved from “nice to have” to genuinely useful: autonomous disinfection, contactless logistics and delivery, telepresence that kept families and clinicians connected, and automation that kept critical operations running while reducing exposure.

Just as importantly, the pandemic accelerated investment and loosened institutional inertia — pilots that would normally take years were stood up in weeks. The lasting lesson is about resilience by design: organisations that had already invested in automation and data adapted faster. That is exactly the kind of forward capacity we help public institutions build before the next shock, not during it.

The programme

The online edition combined a keynote, a discussion panel, and a series of demonstration sessions from companies deploying robotics in the field, including:

• IDMind — service and social robotics
• Introsys — industrial automation and robotics
• Sonae Sierra — robotics in retail and real estate operations
• … and further demonstration sessions across the programme

Watch the full sessions

The complete session series is available on the Lisbon City Council’s channel: