ROCHESTER — Up on the 22nd floor of Mayo Clinic's Charter House, Will gets an order to pick up a meal from the kitchen.
With a printed order slip, Will crosses the dining room, bypassing the building materials on the floor from the ongoing renovations, and enters the kitchen. There, Sous Chef Kyriakos Karabatsos places the food on Will's tray, and Will heads back through the dining room to the main desk.
It seems like a normal interaction until you learn Will is a robot.
Will and a second food service robot, Charlie, arrived at the senior living community in January, assisting employees with tasks such as delivering takeout orders from the kitchen.
"We'd love to do more standing-room-only events up here and have them cater around the room," Karabatsos said. "We'll use them to put all of our dirty dishes and stuff on."
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The 4-foot-3 robots each have three trays and a touchscreen that employees use to input commands. Will and Charlie's screens can also display photos, videos and expressions.
"It can play music. It can sing 'Happy Birthday' to people," said Kelly Morse Nowicki, operations administrator at Mayo Clinic. "We're just going to kind of gradually get some experience with it."
Reflective tiles on the ceiling help the robots navigate the dining room and kitchen. The robots will move around obstacles on the floor, and if a person steps into their path, they'll slow down and stop.
So far, the robots have been well-received by Charter House residents such as Judith Rich O'Fallon, who has lived there for five and a half years.
"I love them," O'Fallon said. "They're cute, and they're fun to watch."
The building's 300 residents chose the names Will and Charlie — referencing the Mayo Clinic's founders — during a naming contest. The two robots carried ballots on their trays, wandering around the dining room so residents could vote and get used to seeing them in action.
Will and Charlie are piloting Mayo Clinic's foray into using service robots in its buildings. Since the arrival of the Charter House robots, Mayo Clinic has introduced two more at Skylight Commons in the Mayo Building, where those robots run food from the kitchen to patrons' tables, Nowicki said. Mayo Clinic leases the four robots from Richtech Robotics.
Future roles for robots at Mayo Clinic could include room service at Charter House and delivering lunches to employees in the Mayo and Gonda buildings. But those goals will have to wait until the robots know how to use elevators.
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"They do horizontal very well, but they don't do vertical yet," Nowicki said. "The main drawback of these right now is it has to stick on the 22nd floor."
The robots won't replace human employees, Nowicki said.
"It's not the goal of it to be a labor savings, per se," Nowicki said. "We really feel like it's an opportunity to expand our programming. It allows us to do what we think we do best, which is to interact with the guests."
In Will and Charlie's case, they save Charter House staff from having to make trips between the dining area's main desk and the kitchen. Instead, those staff can spend time with residents while one of the robots fetches the order.
"Socialization is extremely important for people of our age group," O'Fallon said. "If it runs back and forth, that leaves people here to interact with us. It is not just a matter of getting your food, it's a matter of interacting with people when you're spending an awful lot of time alone in your apartment. There's a very special people value in this."
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