Hospital service robot for nurses, Digi Mart USA News (Germany): Restocking gloves, fetching compresses and delivering supplies to patient rooms take up a considerable share of nurses’ time. According to the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA), logistics account for around 15% of their working hours.
As part of the MuRoC research project, the institute is working with Berlin-based company Pi4_robotics and Charité to develop a robot that could take over some of these errands and routine tasks. The project was announced in a press release published in German.
The system is based on the Workerbot9, a service robot already in series production. For hospital use, the mobile robot would be equipped with a robotic arm, additional sensors and new object recognition software.
Cameras would be used to check inventories of nursing supplies, and the robot would independently retrieve missing items from ward storage rooms and handle urgent deliveries to nursing staff.
The key difference from existing hospital transport robots lies in how they interact with their surroundings. While basic robots only navigate between locations, the Workerbot9 is intended to open doors, cabinets and drawers, pick up objects and place them where they belong.
This could eliminate tasks that currently require staff to manually load and unload other transport systems.
When not busy transporting or sorting supplies, the robot could also help keep patients entertained, for example by reading stories aloud or offering digital crossword puzzles. Contactless monitoring of heart and respiratory rates is also planned.
The project partners say combining functions is intended to keep the robot busy and make its operation economically viable.
The partners are working with nursing staff to determine which functions would be useful in everyday hospital operations, and interviews and nine observational visits to different hospital wards have already taken place. Initial tests are planned for the halfway point of the three-year project at the Berlin Simulation and Training Center (BeST), followed by testing on a trial ward at Charité.
The Workerbot9 will be presented at the German Nursing Day event in Berlin on November 12 and 13, 2026. The hospital-specific functions remain development goals, and how well they will work in practice is still to be seen.
