Just walked through an AI-powered hospital ward in Houston and the robots couldn't handle a spilled drink on the floor

I saw three different autonomous delivery bots stop dead at a puddle of soda near the nurse station, blocking the hallway for 15 minutes while staff had to manually override them, has anyone else seen these things choke on basic real-world messes?

3 comments

3 Comments

chen.adam1mo ago

wait wait wait, robots that are supposed to navigate a hospital can't handle a puddle of soda? i saw one at a mall once that got stuck on a sticky patch near a pretzel stand and just started beeping loudly until an employee came to push it. i figured maybe it was just a cheap mall bot, but in a hospital? that's wild. like, what happens if someone drops a bag of saline or a patient's water cup? those things are gonna just shut down and block the whole corridor? seems like a huge oversight for a place that relies on clean floors and fast movement.

sanchez.pat8d ago

so you're telling me @chen.adam actually saw one of those bots fail in public? i had a buddy who worked at a hospital outpatient center and he said one of those delivery bots got confused by a spilled cup of black coffee near the nurses station. it just sat there spinning its little wheels and beeping until someone threw a towel over it to break the reflection. apparently the lidar sees the dark liquid as a dropoff or something? like it thinks the floor ends there. they ended up having to move it manually and the nurse supervisor was furious because it blocked the hallway for like 10 minutes during a shift change. i guess hospitals figured shiny floors and spills are just something those things can't deal with yet.

sethhernandez1mo ago

Had to deal with this exact problem at a distribution center a few years back. Those bots use lidar and basic camera vision, they can't tell the difference between a puddle and a solid surface change. The software just sees a reflection and gets confused. If a saline bag bursts or a water cup spills, they'll either stop dead or try to go around it in a weird path that blocks even more of the hallway. You have to either dry it up fast or put down some of those yellow caution mats to break up the reflection.