Keeping travel lanes to Ebola-hit West Africa open is essential to fighting the outbreak, argues Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. The U.S. military has already mobilized more than 3,500 troops to the region, and an international assortment of healthcare workers also heads to Africa everyday, where there is a massive doctor shortage .

But amid calls to suspend travel to and from the region, the question is, how does the United States allow health workers to help West Africa while minimizing their risk? One answer that the White House may be exploring is robots.

On Nov. 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy along with researchers from the Texas A & M University's Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, CRASAR , the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and others will convene a workshop to explore ways to keep health workers in Africa safe through robotics.

But before we can send drones to battle Ebola, we first have to invent the right robots for the job. As Evan Ackerman makes clear in this post for IEEE Spectrum , “the problem that we’re having now with Ebola is the same as the problem that we had with Fukushima : there simply aren’t any robots that are prepared and ready, right now, to tackle an immediate crisis, even though robots would be immensely valuable in this situation.”

(Related: Fighting Ebola with Data, Satellites and Drones )

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t robots that could be used for individual tasks. Robin Murphy, the director of CRASAR spells out some of the jobs robots in the Ebola zone might be assigned. These nine points provide a fair indication of what we might soon be asking robots to do in West Africa. Also included, some of the systems that are fulfilling similar roles today, but not necessarily in places like Liberia.

1. “Mortuary robots to respectfully transport the deceased, as [Ebola] is most virulent at the time of death and immediately following death.”

Unsafe methods for handling the dead are directly linked to the rapid spread of Ebola particularly in Liberia. Believe it or not, there already exists a robot designed for emergency mortuary work called the Robokiyu Rescue Robot, which was built for the Tokyo Fire Department in 2008. The Robokiyu had a pair of giant claws to pull the injured or the dead onto a slide to move them away. In the video below, Robokiyu’s successor can be seen safely--if ghoulishly--scooping mannequins into its metal maw.