Newest S.F. hospital features tray-delivering robots

SAN FRANCISCO — The robot, I’m told, is on its way. Any minute now you’ll see it. We can track them, you know. There’s quite a few of them, so it’s only a matter of time. Any minute now.

Ah, and here it is.

Far down the hospital hall, double doors part to reveal the automaton. There’s no dramatic fog or lighting—which I jot down as “disappointing”—only a white, rectangular machine about four feet tall. It waits for the doors to fully part, then cautiously begins to roll toward us, going about as fast as a casual walk, emitting a soft beep every so often to let the humans around it know it’s on a very important quest. It’s not traveling on a track. It’s unleashed. It’s free.

The robot, known as a Tug, edges closer and closer to me at the elbow of the L-shaped corridor and stops. It turns its wheels before accelerating through the turn, then suddenly halts once again. Josh, the photographer I’d brought along, is blocking its path, and by way of its sensors, the robot knows it. Tug, it seems, is programmed to avoid breaking knees.

This hospital—the University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay wing—had opened four days before our visit. From the start, a fleet of Tugs has been shuffling around the halls. They deliver drugs and clean linens and meals while carting away medical waste and soiled sheets and trash. And by the time the fleet spins up to 25 robots on March 1, it’ll be the largest swarm of Tug medical automatons in the world, with each robot traveling an admirable average of 12 miles a day.

The whole circus is, in a word, bewildering. The staff still seems unsure what to make of Tug. Reactions I witness range from daaawing over its cuteness (the gentle bleeping, the slow-going, the politeness of stopping before pancaking people) to an unconvincingly restrained horror that the machines had suddenly become sentient. I grew up in Silicon Valley and write for WIRED and even I’m confused about it. The whole thing is just weird.

It’s really weird. And I’m not sure I like it much.

Roll, Roll, Roll Your Scary-Intelligent Medical Robot

The Tug that’d emerged without so much as smoke or pyrotechnics had come from the kitchen, where the exhaust system hums worryingly loud and a man hands out hairnets and even a beardnet to Josh, who finds this more amusing than inconvenient. Dan Henroid, the hospital’s director of nutrition and food services, has brought me to a wall where Tugs are lined up charging in their docking stations, save for one robot out doing the rounds.

“We’ve named ours after fruit,” he says, forcefully, over the fans. “So we have Apple, Grape, Banana, Orange, Pear—and Banana is out right now. At some point we’ll get them skins so they actually look like the fruit.” Other departments have their own naming conventions, with monikers that include Tuggy McFresh and Little McTuggy, plus Wall-E and of course the love of his life, Eve (the hospital is apparently trying to get permission from Disney to dress them up like they appear in the movie). Other Tugs will be stylized as cable cars, because, well, it’s San Francisco and why the hell not.

If you’re a patient here, you can call down to Henroid and his team and place your order if you’re keen on being a savage, or you can use the fancy tablet at your bedside and tap your order in. Down in the kitchen, the cooks—who aren’t robots—fire up your food, load it onto a Tug, and use a touchscreen next to the docking stations to tell the robot where to go. Once the food is loaded, the Tug will wait for 10 minutes, then depart, whether it has just one tray or 12, its max capacity.

There are no beacons to guide the Tugs. Instead, they use maps in their brains to navigate. They’re communicating with the overall system through the hospital’s Wi-Fi, which also allows them to pick up fire alarms and get out of the way so carbon-based lifeforms can escape. Rolling down the halls using a laser and 27 infrared and ultrasonic sensors to avoid collisions, a Tug will stop well away from the elevators and call one down through the Wi-Fi (to open doors, it uses radio waves). It’ll only board an elevator that’s empty, pulling in and doing a three-point turn to flip 180 degrees before disembarking. After it’s made its deliveries to any number of floors—the fleet has delivered every meal since the hospital opened—it gathers empty trays and returns them to the kitchen, where it starts the whole process anew.

And the cooks and other kitchen staff, says Henroid, adore them for it. “In fact, I think the most interesting thing is people have been very respectful of the robots. When we went and talked to other people at other hospitals, they said, ‘Oh, people get in the way.’ We haven’t had any of that. I think we did a lot as an organization to sort of prime people and say, ‘Hey, the robot’s got a job to do. Stay out of their way.’”

It sounds demeaning, but the humans had been coached on how to deal with robots. So welcome to the future. Your robot ethics instructor will see you now.

“Tuggy! Tuggy Tug!”

Isaac Asimov had three now-iconic rules for robots: They can’t hurt us or let us get hurt, they must follow orders, and they must protect their own existence. We can now tack onto these the new rules for the humans who interact with medical automatons.

“We had to train on a lot of robot etiquette, you know,” says operations director Brian Herriot as we walk the halls in search of Tugs, aided by a laptop that tracks their movements. “Which is, we train them to treat a robot like your grandma, and she’s in the hospital in a wheel chair. If something’s in their way, just move it aside, don’t go stand in front of them.”

The robot, I’m told, is on its way. Any minute now you’ll see it. We can track them, you know. There’s quite a few of them, so it’s only a matter of time. Any minute now.

Ah, and here it is.

Far down the hospital hall, double doors part to reveal the automaton. There’s no dramatic fog or lighting—which I jot down as “disappointing”—only a white, rectangular machine about four feet tall. It waits for the doors to fully part, then cautiously begins to roll toward us, going about as fast as a casual walk, emitting a soft beep every so often to let the humans around it know it’s on a very important quest. It’s not traveling on a track. It’s unleashed. It’s free.

The robot, known as a Tug, edges closer and closer to me at the elbow of the L-shaped corridor and stops. It turns its wheels before accelerating through the turn, then suddenly halts once again. Josh, the photographer I’d brought along, is blocking its path, and by way of its sensors, the robot knows it. Tug, it seems, is programmed to avoid breaking knees.

This hospital—the University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay wing—had opened four days before our visit. From the start, a fleet of Tugs has been shuffling around the halls. They deliver drugs and clean linens and meals while carting away medical waste and soiled sheets and trash. And by the time the fleet spins up to 25 robots on March 1, it’ll be the largest swarm of Tug medical automatons in the world, with each robot traveling an admirable average of 12 miles a day.

The whole circus is, in a word, bewildering. The staff still seems unsure what to make of Tug. Reactions I witness range from daaawing over its cuteness (the gentle bleeping, the slow-going, the politeness of stopping before pancaking people) to an unconvincingly restrained horror that the machines had suddenly become sentient. I grew up in Silicon Valley and write for WIRED and even I’m confused about it. The whole thing is just weird.

It’s really weird. And I’m not sure I like it much.

Roll, Roll, Roll Your Scary-Intelligent Medical Robot

The Tug that’d emerged without so much as smoke or pyrotechnics had come from the kitchen, where the exhaust system hums worryingly loud and a man hands out hairnets and even a beardnet to Josh, who finds this more amusing than inconvenient. Dan Henroid, the hospital’s director of nutrition and food services, has brought me to a wall where Tugs are lined up charging in their docking stations, save for one robot out doing the rounds.

“We’ve named ours after fruit,” he says, forcefully, over the fans. “So we have Apple, Grape, Banana, Orange, Pear—and Banana is out right now. At some point we’ll get them skins so they actually look like the fruit.” Other departments have their own naming conventions, with monikers that include Tuggy McFresh and Little McTuggy, plus Wall-E and of course the love of his life, Eve (the hospital is apparently trying to get permission from Disney to dress them up like they appear in the movie). Other Tugs will be stylized as cable cars, because, well, it’s San Francisco and why the hell not.

If you’re a patient here, you can call down to Henroid and his team and place your order if you’re keen on being a savage, or you can use the fancy tablet at your bedside and tap your order in. Down in the kitchen, the cooks—who aren’t robots—fire up your food, load it onto a Tug, and use a touchscreen next to the docking stations to tell the robot where to go. Once the food is loaded, the Tug will wait for 10 minutes, then depart, whether it has just one tray or 12, its max capacity.

There are no beacons to guide the Tugs. Instead, they use maps in their brains to navigate. They’re communicating with the overall system through the hospital’s Wi-Fi, which also allows them to pick up fire alarms and get out of the way so carbon-based lifeforms can escape. Rolling down the halls using a laser and 27 infrared and ultrasonic sensors to avoid collisions, a Tug will stop well away from the elevators and call one down through the Wi-Fi (to open doors, it uses radio waves). It’ll only board an elevator that’s empty, pulling in and doing a three-point turn to flip 180 degrees before disembarking. After it’s made its deliveries to any number of floors—the fleet has delivered every meal since the hospital opened—it gathers empty trays and returns them to the kitchen, where it starts the whole process anew.

And the cooks and other kitchen staff, says Henroid, adore them for it. “In fact, I think the most interesting thing is people have been very respectful of the robots. When we went and talked to other people at other hospitals, they said, ‘Oh, people get in the way.’ We haven’t had any of that. I think we did a lot as an organization to sort of prime people and say, ‘Hey, the robot’s got a job to do. Stay out of their way.’”

It sounds demeaning, but the humans had been coached on how to deal with robots. So welcome to the future. Your robot ethics instructor will see you now.

“Tuggy! Tuggy Tug!”

Isaac Asimov had three now-iconic rules for robots: They can’t hurt us or let us get hurt, they must follow orders, and they must protect their own existence. We can now tack onto these the new rules for the humans who interact with medical automatons.

“We had to train on a lot of robot etiquette, you know,” says operations director Brian Herriot as we walk the halls in search of Tugs, aided by a laptop that tracks their movements. “Which is, we train them to treat a robot like your grandma, and she’s in the hospital in a wheel chair. If something’s in their way, just move it aside, don’t go stand in front of them.”

Asimov’s laws are good to keep in mind so we don’t end up with murderous hordes of machines, but we need to start talking more about the other side of things. How should we treat them? We need laws for human-robot interaction. For the moment, it seems that we’re supposed to just pretend they’re Grandma. That’s Law Number One. What the other laws will be, I’m not so sure. How will we treat AI that’s smart enough to pass as human, for instance? I mean, we’re already getting emotional about a box that rolls around hospitals. Maybe it’s too early to tell these things. Give me some time to think about it.

In this hospital, Law Number One is working. Most staffers have a strange nonreciprocal affection for Tugs. Reactions to our convoy of PR reps and technicians and me and Josh and of course robots included, but were not limited to: