Nurses with patients, not carts.

01

How the standards (R15.08 and ISO 3691-4) shape the deployment

ANSI/RIA R15.08 is the US safety standard for industrial mobile robots — it defines how an autonomous mobile robot must detect and respond to people, mark its zones, and behave around a human in its path. ISO 3691-4 is the international standard for driverless industrial trucks. Neither is a box you check on the robot; both describe how the whole deployment — speed zones, sensor coverage, signage, staff training, and the building itself — has to be set up so the unit is safe in an occupied hospital.

This is exactly why a hospital should not buy a bare robot and self-deploy it. The OEM ships a machine that is capable of compliant operation; making the actual deployment compliant in your corridors is integration work. We treat the standard as the spec for the install, not an afterthought — speed and stop zones mapped to your traffic, sensors validated for your layout, and staff trained on how the unit behaves before it runs a live floor.

02

Buy vs. RaaS in a hospital

Hospital capital budgets do not absorb a fleet of $16k–$96k machines easily, and a robot that fails in a clinical setting cannot sit idle waiting on an overseas parts queue. Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) folds the robot, the compliant deployment, the service, and a backup unit into one monthly fee — which is why most health systems start on RaaS for delivery and cleaning. Outright purchase makes sense once a model is proven across the system and biomed can carry the upkeep. We surface both, with the real total-cost math, in a quote.

03

The labor case for hospital robots (illustrative)

The payback in a hospital is clinical hours, not just labor rate. When a nurse or a tech stops walking specimens to the lab and supplies from central stores, those minutes go back to patient care — the work the building exists for. A delivery robot on RaaS (~$335–$550/month) absorbs the repetitive runs; an autonomous scrubber on RaaS (~$600–$900/month for a mid-size unit) runs roughly 4–6× cheaper than a full-time overnight cleaner (~$3,500–$4,500/month all-in) on the open-corridor portion of the job.

The honest framing: this is not a headcount cut, it is a reach multiplier and a safety play. The robot runs the trips and the open floor so staff do the work that needs a clinician or an EVS specialist. We build the real side-by-side — including the compliant-deployment cost — in a quote.

• Delivery robot on RaaS: ~$335–$550 / month — illustrative.
• Mid-size scrubber on RaaS: ~$600–$900 / month — illustrative.
• Full-time overnight cleaner (all-in): ~$3,500–$4,500 / month — illustrative.
• These are illustrative ranges with stated assumptions, not a guaranteed result.

04

Why a hospital should buy through an integrator, not a bare OEM

A robot OEM ships a hospital a machine and a login. Everything that decides whether it is safe and useful in a clinical building — picking the right enclosed unit, financing it, making the deployment meet R15.08 / ISO 3691-4, integrating the elevator, training EVS and nursing, and fixing it fast when it fails mid-shift — is left to the hospital, usually across several vendors and a slow support queue.

Service Robot Co. is the one vendor for all five, and OEM-neutral about which unit. We pick the right hospital robot for your protocol, surface buy-vs-RaaS financing, deploy it to the safety standard, integrate the elevator where the building supports it, train your staff, and service it through a US engineer network with a backup ready. You get a compliant, working deployment — not a robotics project on a clinical director’s desk.