Hospital AGV - HelpMate - AIMing for Automated Vehicles

AIMing for Automated Vehicles

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Paul Grayson

Hospital AGV - HelpMate
November 21, 2007

Here in Traverse City, MI, as is the case in many small towns, the hospital is the biggest business. It is bigger than any of the factories, it is bigger than any of the resorts or hotels, the building with its many floors and many wings is easily the largest building around. Employee cars fill the multi-deck employee parking garage and all of the surrounding side streets. The medical building itself is a perpetual construction zone as additions are constantly being made. By any measure the business of people repair and maintenance is a growth industry. Medical center help wanted ads are a large percentage of all the help wanted ads in the newspaper. The local college nursing program is filled to capacity and still there are not enough people to do all of the work that needs to be done at the hospital. Obviously this is an industry that needs AGVs to bring greater efficiency to hospitals / health-care providers and help make up for labor shortages.

Unimation Inc., manufactures of the first industrial arm, was bought out and under the conditions of the sale was barred from making anything with arms. The crew in Danbury, CT, formed Transitions Research Inc. (TRC) and began building robots that conspicuously lacked arms. I stopped in one Saturday to see if anyone was there and sure enough the Chief Engineer opened the door. He showed me one of the HelpMate robots up on jack stands with its fiberglass shell removed and we spent the afternoon going over how each of the systems worked. The Chief started up one of the finished ones and I watched as the robot went through the start up and sensor check sequence then ran through the hospital hallway obstacle course used for testing them. The HelpMate AGV performed flawlessly. There was about every kind of "terrain" that one could expect to find in a large hospital. There were ramps - where they discovered that the drive system needed magnetic brakes so if someone hit the stop switch when it was on a ramp the 600 lb. machine would not coast down the ramp. There were rubber mats built into the floor, there were low railings, an elevator car for the vehicle to practice getting on and off elevators, there was a foil lined hot room to bake them, and more. The most challenging obstacle to deal with was said to be the "low hanging shelf.” Many hospitals have fold down shelf/desks on the walls for people to use when making quick notes on a record. These shelves present themselves edge-on to the robot coming at them and are a challenge for the detectors to detect. This problem was solved by placing a sensor low on the robot angled up to detect the underside of the shelf in time for the HelpMate AGV to avoid it. Since then the HelpMate robot business was spun off as HelpMate Inc. (OTC: HELP), which in turn was bought out by Pyxis Corporation, a subsidiary of Cardinal Health, Inc. (NYSE: CAH).

The HelpMate system is the first of its kind to navigate autonomously through hospitals and other health-care facilities and is one of the only trackless robots in production being used to transport pharmaceuticals, lab specimens, supplies, medical records and other essential items throughout hospitals and other medical facilities 24 hours a day 7 days a week cost-effectively.

HelpMate looks much like a refrigerator, is 4 feet 6 inches tall, and weighs approximately 600 pounds. It employs state-of-the-art sensor technology, wireless radio, proprietary software to guide it from point to point, avoids stationary and moving objects, summons elevators (a joint development with Otis Elevator Co.), travels between floors, announces its arrival at destinations, signals closed doors to open, and does all of this without fixed tracks or guide wires while maintaining communications with a central computer. Battery-powered it can be dispatched by users via an on-board screen and keyboard. The key to their being used individually and in small fleets at health-care facilities in 30 states and several other countries is the leasing agreement. Hospitals can pay about $6 per hour that the HelpMate is used, a labor expense, rather than the $110,000 purchase price, a capitol investment which is often times much harder to get approval for.

Pyxis introduced an improved HelpMate system at the 1999 Midyear Clinical Meeting of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. Pyxis has integrated the HelpMate system and patented technology with its line of automated pharmaceutical and medical-supply dispensing systems. These advanced integrated systems streamline the medication and medical-supply distribution process allowing pharmacists and nurses to direct more energy to patient care.