Healthcare robot systems for a hospital environment: CareBot and ReceptionBot

This paper presents a robot system for healthcare facility environments. Current healthcare robot systems do not address healthcare workflows well and our goal is to provide distributed, heterogeneous multiple robot systems that are capable of integrating with healthcare workflows and are easy to modify when workflow requirements change. The proposed system consists of three subsystems: a receptionist robot system, a nurse assistant robot system, and a medical server. The roles of the receptionist robot and the nurse assistant robot are to do tasks to help the human receptionist and nurse. The healthcare robots upload and download patient information through the medical server and provide data summaries to human care givers via a web interface. We developed these healthcare robot systems based on our new robotic software framework, which is designed to easily integrate different programming frameworks, and minimize the impact of framework differences and new versions. We test the functionalities of each healthcare robot system, evaluate the robot-robot collaboration, and present a case study.