While you can’t have a conversation with them, they do speak a few phrases — including “crossing hallway” and “TUG has arrived” — and they stop the moment they are touched. If a fire alarm goes off, the robots pull off to the side of the hallway to get out of the way.

Initially, the TUGs will be used to carry carts full of small packages, bulk food, nonurgent medical supplies and linens to the basement level of the new hospital, where, for now, a staff member will get the items to their final destination. The TUGs also will haul dirty linens, used food trays and garbage from the new hospital and ferry it back to the dock.

In between jobs, the TUGs automatically return to recharge at their docking stations.

Robotic pharmacy

You won’t see many pills in the new hospital pharmacy. That’s because most of them are stored inside three giant robotic machines, which don’t get tired, rushed or make mistakes as they’re filling drug orders for patients.

Two of them, the BoxPickers, aren’t what you imagine when you think of a robot. They are more like giant cabinets with a computer interface on the outside. Inside, there are stacks of drawers containing boxes of medications and a mechanical arm, or picker, that moves up and down the aisles. The BoxPickers currently store nearly $5 million worth of medications — about 80 percent of what’s stored in the patient care unit’s medication dispensing cabinets, located in the medication areas on the hospital floors.

Each day, when it’s time to restock the dispensers with medications, the technician checks the BoxPicker’s computer to determine which are needed and in what quantities. On the other side of the cabinet, the arm locates the box containing that specific medication and moves it into a drawer that unlocks for the technician.

Besides the time-savings afforded by the pharmacy robots, the machines reduce the chance of pill-selection errors, said Douglas Del Paggio, PharmD, assistant director of pharmacy.

“Instead of me going over to a bin and pulling a drug and looking at it — and if I’m in a rush, I may accidentally pull the wrong one, or the wrong drug is in the wrong bin — in these robots, it is all bar-code scanned and checked, so it’s very accurate — like 99.9 percent,” Del Paggio said.

The BoxPickers also keep a running inventory and automatically generate new orders for the drug wholesaler on a daily basis.

“You have more seamless control of inventory, because you’re not just eyeballing and saying, ‘I think I need more of that,’ which is how we’ve been doing it for decades,” Del Paggio said.

Across the room, a third robot — a suction-powered machine called the PillPick — counts out bulk medications and slides them into individual, bar-coded packets.

When a physician puts a patient’s order into the electronic health record system for one of these drugs, the only human work required is for a pharmacist to verify the order. Then the robot goes to work, whirring and hissing. Within seconds, a day’s worth of medicine slides down a conveyor belt, organized on a plastic ring.

The PillPick can package 1,000 doses per hour — the same amount that it would take a pharmacy technician about 10 hours to pack by hand.

“This allows our pharmacists and technicians to instead spend more of their time with physicians, nurses, and most importantly,” Del Paggio said, “directly with patients and family members.”