AWS Robotics Blog

Category: Healthcare

PR2 navigating the Hospital World

Testing a PR2 Robot in a simulated Hospital World

Nowadays, risk of spreading disease is a key concern in hospitals, where doctors, nurses and other caregivers are on the front lines helping patients. Hospitals have started using robots in daily operations such as contactless delivery and room disinfection to reduce risk of spreading disease. As the need for robots in healthcare grows, better tools are needed to build, test, and deploy robotics applications quickly and safely. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed a Gazebo simulated Hospital World and published it as open source so that robotics companies within the Healthcare industry can more easily test their robots in a simulated hospital environment. In this blog, I will provide an overview of the hospital and share my experience using it to test a PR2 robot, including software failures that I encountered that you may find helpful.