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Hospital Robots
bluegreenone writes: "The Washington Post has an article about hospital robots. The most interesting part was hearing the robot's 'co-workers' describe their relationship with him." Only slightly scary.
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i've seen a similar bot at Childrens Hospital in Pittsburgh. cute.
3
...together with some blurb, can be found here:a sp
:)
http://www.pyxis.com/products/newhelpmate.
You do realize that there was a 1954 movie called "Tobor the Great", about another robot with such a name
Ciao,
Klaus
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Pyxis Corporation
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
More info and pictures are here. Including a flash introduction that shows some more thing about it. It has signal lights to indicate the direction it is going. I like that. No tech info there though.
I can understand your viewpoint from the standpoint of document transferral -- tis much cheaper and efficient to do it electronically, however this robot has benefits that are realizable from a physical materials standpoint.
I used to work in a large switch manufacturing facility that used rover robots extensively to transpoint large amount of material or components all around the factory floor, and these rovers were very useful in that they seldom broke down, and when they did, the plant had people on hand to be able to fix them. They also weren't mission critical -- if they all broke down, the backup was to get out the forklifts and manually move items from site to site, but that expends a person's time, which is much more valuable than a machine which can work 24x7.
In a hospital environment, this would be useful for transporting daily medications from a central pharmacy to the various in-patient floors throughout a facility. I wouldn't trust it to deliver it directly to the patient, since drug administration should be carried out by licensed practitioners, but taking it to the nurses station would save time. Also, could be useful to transport materials such as instruments, bandages, gauze, etc, from a central storage to the nurses stations as well. I see lots of applications for this robot, and not just within the health care sector.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
The article was short on technical details like a lot of broad interest articles are. But the current version of the robot uses a good ole' 68K as its main processor and various 68hc11's as slave processors. It has several systems that work together to bring about its behavior. Navigation and path planning are done in the 68K while the lower level stuff like sonar ranging and collision detection are done with the 68HC11's. There is a 486 (or 286, depending on the version) in the current incarnation that facilitates Ethernet connectivity and another for structured vision to detect obstacles in front of the robot. Given the relative simplicity of the robot's architecture it navigates really well and one of its biggest problems is crowded hallways. People are moving constantly and the robot cannot currently infer where the detected obstacle has moved. So most people do not have it plan its route through crowed hallways. I work for Pyxis, but the usual disclaimers apply - the views expressed here are my own and I am trying not to share too much info because a lot of it is proprietary. -George
I actually saw this robot in action and spoke with the developers when I was contracting for the company that makes them. They were going to use them in-house to deliver mail to the various mail stops around the buildings.
The fact that it "stops" when it no longer can move safely is simply a time-out. Given a few seconds, it tests to see if the way has been cleared, and if so, it will continue along. If after a certain number of re-try's, it still cannot move, it actually notifies the people in charge of it wirelessly, not simply stand there and say "I cannot go on".
And as said before, these robots do not carry the narcotics, important drugs. They are used to fill the time doses for that floor, i.e. antibiotics every couple of hours, etc. Some hospitals are using them to deliver food, and for more fully automated hospitals, it delivers refills of supplies that the pharmacy automatically tracks.
Andrew
http://www.robot-rx.com/prodserv/robot_intro.php3
is another one