A Tertiary Hospital in China Ran Ten Delivery Robots Against 19 Porters

Transport that depended on people walking the corridors

A tertiary hospital in China moves a steady stream of drugs and laboratory specimens between wards, pharmacy and testing areas. Before the trial, that work fell to a team of nineteen manual porters, and the clock ran against them on nearly every run.

Most manual deliveries took between 22 and 44 minutes, and the slowest runs stretched to 52 minutes. For a nurse waiting on a dose or a sample, that spread matters more than the average.

Walking distance, missed items and uneven coverage of departments added to the strain. Keeping a porter team staffed across every route at every hour is hard to sustain.

Ten robots ran beside the manual team for six months

The hospital put ten autonomous mobile robots on its delivery work and ran them for six months against the nineteen manual workers. The two teams worked the same hospital at the same time, so the numbers reflect one site under one set of conditions.

Each robot planned a global route through the building, then used a local navigation method to steer around obstacles as it moved. A queuing approach coordinated the fleet, so robots were sequenced rather than competing for the same corridor.

The fleet handled drug and specimen deliveries inside the hospital, the core transport work that slows clinical teams down.

• Set ten robots against nineteen porters on the same hospital workload
• Plan global routes, then steer locally around obstacles in motion
• Coordinate the fleet so dispatch stays orderly across all ten units
• Track delivery time, trips, accuracy, omissions and staff and patient feedback

Faster runs, more trips and fewer errors

The robot fleet completed 7.3 times more delivery trips than the nineteen manual workers over six months. Robot deliveries ran 32% to 36% faster than manual ones, and 95 percent of robot tasks finished within 18 to 28 minutes.

The robot group reached 13.1 times more departments and carried 3.8 times more medicine boxes. It moved 5.5 times more total weight while cutting total transport distance by 68%.

Accuracy stood out. The robot group recorded 100% verification accuracy and item integrity, with a significantly lower omission rate than the manual group. Nurses and patients both reported significantly higher satisfaction with the robot group.

Reading the benchmark for a porter team decision

Hospital operators weighing robots against a porter team seldom get a clean before and after on the same floors. This deployment offers a benchmark on staffing, delivery time and transport distance that a facilities team can hold against its own numbers.

Service Robot Co. is a vendor neutral robot integrator for US businesses. We select the right robots across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network, so one partner handles the full lifecycle. We offer robot leasing for business on a three-year lease with one fixed payment, quoted after a site assessment and mapping of the building, with monthly payment programs available.

The hospital's results show that route planning and fleet coordination carry much of the weight, which is why our process starts with site assessment and mapping rather than a catalog pick. This is a documented real-world example we analyze, not a Service Robot Co. deployment.