Robots for hospitals and health systems

Hospitals move carts, trays, linens and meals all day along the same corridors, and clean acres of hard floor every night. Those are robot jobs. Sterilization is not, and we say that first because we are asked it most.

Free, about two minutes, no phone number. You get an honest no when a robot is the wrong answer.

Who this is for

You run a hospital or a health system with a sterile processing department, a loading dock, a kitchen and a pharmacy that all send carts along the same corridors, plus miles of hard floor that a night crew scrubs.

What automates first here

• Case cart and sterile tray transport: mobile robots on scheduled corridor runs between sterile processing and the operating rooms
• Material movement by mobile robot: linens, meals, pharmacy and lab runs on the same fleet
• Autonomous floor scrubbing: corridors and lobbies at night, sized by the narrowest corridor
• Delivery robots: the hospitality class of robot, useful in some hospital settings and honestly limited in others

Machines that usually make the shortlist

Hospital logistics robots such as Aethon's TUG family and general mobile robots from MiR and others run corridor routes and call elevators through integrations that belong in the quote. Compact scrubbers from Avidbots, Tennant and others handle corridors. What no machine in our matrix does is sterilize instruments: that is the autoclave's job under healthcare regulation, and any robot in sterile processing works around the sterilizer, not instead of it.

Every machine named on this site is in the published matrix with figures checked against the maker's material and no prices, because a price before an engineer has seen the job is a guess.

What has to be true before anyone quotes

• Corridor widths, elevator integration and infection control rules for the route.
• Who dispatches, charges and cleans the robots, and how they are decontaminated.
• Cart and tray standardization: a robot moves a cart it can dock to.
• Night floor traffic and the narrowest corridor for a scrubber.
• IT and security review, because these robots live on the hospital network.

When a robot is the wrong answer here

• Sterilization or disinfection of instruments by robot.
• Routes with no elevator integration budget.
• Carts that are never standardized.
• A single small clinic with no repeat corridor runs.

Someone has already done this

Common questions

Can a robot sterilize surgical instruments?

No. Sterilization is done by validated equipment under healthcare regulation. Robots can move the case carts and trays to and from sterile processing, and that is the job worth quoting.

Do hospital robots ride elevators?

The purpose-built hospital logistics robots do, through an integration with the elevator controller that is part of the project cost. General floor scrubbers do not, so plan one per floor.

Who owns infection control for the robot?

Your team does, and the maker's decontamination procedure has to fit it. Ask for the written procedure before the demo.