Design of a robotic automation system for transportation of goods in hospitals

Author

Özkil, Ali Gürcan ; Dawids, Steen ; Fan, Zhun ; Sørensen, Torben

Author_Institution

Middle East Tech. Univ., Ankara

fYear

2007

fDate

20-23 June 2007

Firstpage

392

Lastpage

397

Abstract

Hospitals face with heavy traffic of goods everyday, where transportation tasks are mainly carried by human. Analysis of the current situation of transportation in a typical hospital showed several transportation tasks are suitable for automation. This paper presents a system, consisting of a fleet of robot vehicles, automatic stations and smart containers for automation of transportation of goods in hospitals. Design of semi-autonomous robot vehicles, containers and stations are presented and the overall system architecture is described. Implementing such a system in an existing hospital showed the need of necessary modifications to the hospital infrastructure.

Keywords

control system synthesis; goods distribution; medical control systems; mobile robots; transportation; goods transportation; hospitals; robotic automation system design; semiautonomous robot vehicles; Containers; Design automation; Hospitals; Humans; Intelligent robots; Manufacturing automation; Navigation; Road transportation; Robotics and automation; Vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation, 2007. CIRA 2007. International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Jacksonville, FI

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0790-7

Electronic_ISBN

1-4244-0790-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CIRA.2007.382926

Filename

4269926