Panasonic HOSPI

HOSPI is Panasonic's autonomous hospital courier, sold as model AP-3020A since October 2013 and still offered today. The company began developing it in early 2010 after studying nursing work at its own Matsushita Memorial Hospital in Osaka, where moving drugs and specimens around the building turned out to be one of the biggest drains on nursing and laboratory staff time. What made it notable was what it did not need. Hospital transport systems of that era ran on rails hidden in ceilings and shafts, or on magnetic tape stuck to the floor; a breakdown mid-route meant calling a contractor to retrieve the payload. HOSPI navigates on a stored map plus laser range finders, so no building works are required, routes can be redrawn when a department moves, and if the robot ever stops in a corridor, anyone can simply open it and take the specimen out. It calls and rides lifts on its own, which is what makes multi-floor delivery possible, and passes through automatic doors. The machine is 630 mm wide, 725 mm deep and 1,386 mm tall, weighs about 170 kg and carries up to 20 kg — a compartment equivalent to six A3-sized medicine trays. It moves at up to 1.0 m/s, runs about seven hours on a charge and needs about eight to refill. The cargo door is locked and opens only to an ID card, which is what allows controlled drugs, infusion medicines, chemotherapy agents and urine specimens to travel in their original packaging; the robot also logs who operated it, what they did and where it went, with an optional forward-facing camera. On 20 April 2016 HOSPI became the first robot certified under Japan's then-new JIS B 8445 and JIS B 8446-1 personal-care robot standards, and it obtained ISO 13482 at the same time. Panasonic has since extended the name into a small family: HOSPI Cargo, which carries up to sixteen medicine trays or three 50-litre folding containers, and HOSPI Signage, a public-space version fitted with up to three 27-inch screens. The robot has worked outside Japan too, notably at Changi General Hospital in Singapore, and has been trialled in airports and hotels.

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