Development of a hospital service robot for transporting task

This paper presents a mobile robot fro routine delivery tasks of medicine, specimen, and medical devices from one station to another in hospitals. This hospital transport robot uses the fluorescent lamps on the ceiling of the corridor as natural landmarks to localize its position and orientation. A simple and efficient algorithm has been developed based on motion continuity and features matching for on-line computation of the position and orientation. A robust method is also presented for the robot to avoid collisions with static obstacles and people moving in the hospital. We have implemented this transport robot in a hospital in Hong Kong. An experimental result was demonstrated to confirm the performance of the localization and navigation algorithms.