R2D2's next assignment: hospital orderly

4th March 2016

Enaie Azambuja

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A team of 27 robots are zooming around the hallways of the new University of California, San Francisco hospital at Mission Bay. They look a bit like R2D2, dragging a platform around behind them. Instead of drones, think of them more as little flatbed trucks, ferrying carts of stuff around the vast hospital complex - food, linens, medications, medical waste and garbage. And they do it more efficiently than humans.

"This one is going up to one of the floors. It's carrying meals that were ordered in probably the last 20 minutes," said Dan Henroid, who is in charge of this elite fleet, as he pointed to a robot motoring by him.

Henroid, who is also director of nutrition and food services for the USCF Medical Center, says each Tug travels about 35 miles each day. Over the past year, they have made more than 157,000 trips through the hospital.

Henroid said no one in the hospital has lost a job to the robots. UCSF was in the midst of a hiring spree for the new hospital, and the Tugs allowed him to hire about 30 fewer workers than he would have otherwise.

He added that the robots are really just carting things from one point to another, something most humans would not find particularly rewarding. "The Tug has a job to do, and it's sort of a thankless job. So, I think, better to have a robot doing it, perhaps, than a human."

Overall, the Tug program has cost UCSF about $6 million, including the changes required to hospital infrastructure to accommodate the robots. But Henroid said they have still saved the hospital money. "The cost of transporting materials and supplies waste is an overhead cost. So the more you can do you that efficiently, the less cost you have," he explained.

About 120 hospitals throughout the U.S. are using Tugs, according to manufacturer Aethon in Pittsburgh.

For some departments, such as the bustling hospital kitchen where the Tugs pick up carts loaded with trays of food and drop off dirty dishes, employees have eagerly adopted their automated co-workers. "In nutrition food services, we named all of ours for fruit - so we have Apple, Pear, Blueberry, Orange and Grape," explained Henroid.

Each one is carefully programmed to stay out of the way, said Henroid, but sometimes it feels as if one could mow down a bystander. The robots have very little contact with patients. They mostly stay in the hallways or nurses' stations, where human workers pick up their goods and deliver them to patients in person.