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Thursday, October 25, 2001

By Eve Modzelewski, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Personal robots are flashy and novel curiosities -- but they're not always big money-makers for the companies that produce them.

	Henry Thorne, chief executive officer of Aethon, says the company's latest small robot will propel hospitals into a new era. Tug, a delivery robot, is designed to attach to the bottom of a cart, then navigate supplies through hospital corridors. (Matt Freed/Post-Gazette)

It's a lesson Henry Thorne learned as founder of Probotics, a North Side-based firm that two months ago changed its name to Aethon.

Until recently, Probotics focused on making fun little robots, called Cye, that vacuumed carpets and served coffee. Even though it made 700 of the $995 Cye robots, the sales volume was never enough for the company to turn a profit.

"I thought if I made the first robot vacuum cleaner, I would be a millionaire. But I'm actually poorer now," Thorne said, laughing. "We were part of the high-tech toy thing, and we're not part of that now."

Instead, Aethon has shifted toward creating powerful machines that can navigate 500-pound carts through a hospital. Using the patented wireless indoor positioning system technology it developed for Cye, the company's new 50-pound delivery robot, Tug, can handle 10 times more weight than Cye and works with a built-in PC. It can attach to hospital carts and is designed to autonomously deliver loads of linens, medical supplies, X-rays, food and other materials.

The promise of Tug is such that Aethon this week closed on $500,000 in financing from the publicly funded venture capital organization Innovation Works. Combined with $1 million it received last month from 13 private investors, the funds will be used to hire new employees and to commercialize Tug.

"Anybody raising new capital for a start-up in Pittsburgh is good news right now," said Gordon Nelson, one of four Aethon board members. "And that it happened around the Sept. 11 events was quite remarkable."

The firm's recent name change reflects its shift in strategy.

While Probotics emphasized the robot side of the company, the firm was looking for a title that would identify it as an indoor transportation business. Aethon, in Greek mythology, was the lead horse in the Helios chariot that pulled the sun across the sky.

"We just loved the image," Nelson said. The Tugs serve an analogous purpose, pulling carts through buildings.

Nelson and Thorne, Aethon's chief executive officer, see a big market for the Tugs -- 4,500 hospitals across the country, to be exact. The firm has been working with UPMC Health System for a year and a half to develop a working prototype of the robot, which it expects will be installed in hospitals nationwide by the middle of next year.

Hospitals usually have as many equipment carts as they do beds, and nurses and technicians spend a good deal of their time moving the carts. Three shifts a day, seven days a week, the carts transport linens, waste, surgical supplies and pharmaceuticals all over hospitals.

"We see an opportunity to eliminate a very tedious repetition," said Rick Sobehart, president and CEO of UPMC St. Margaret Hospital, where the Tugs are being tested. He noted that the robots allow caregivers, who typically have to leave their work stations to get equipment and supplies, to remain at their posts.

It's expected that UPMC, which also is an investor in Aethon, eventually will deploy the Tugs throughout its network of hospitals if the Tugs prove successful.

Each of the robots costs $35,000, a price that Thorne and Sobehart said was about a quarter of what it would cost for hospital employees to do the tasks. San Diego-based Pyxis makes a comparable product, Help Mate, which sells for about $159,000 and includes the cart and some other expanded features.

To compete with other automated delivery robot companies, Thorne has called on robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University, Oxford University and Massachusetts Institute for Technology. The board of directors also includes Sean McDonald, CEO of the South Side biotech start-up Precision Therapeutics Inc. and founder of one of Automated Healthcare, which developed a drug dispensing system and was acquired by San Francisco-based McKesson Corp. in 1996.

This is how the Tugs work: They use a sonar device and infrared sensors to navigate through buildings and avoid running into obstacles. "If you jump in front of it, it stops and doesn't hurt you," said Thorne, a CMU alumnus who has 20 years of experience in robotics.

The robot's on-board PC contains a map so it can locate various destinations in the building. It can summon elevators (only after a communication device is installed in the elevator), open automatic doors and alert a recipient once it has arrived at its destination with a load of supplies. It also can dispatch a similar alert of the estimated time of arrival.

"We want to be the FedEx of the indoors," Thorne said. But unlike FedEx vehicles, the robots don't need people to operate them.

The Tug itself is about the size of a small suitcase, and its wheels move it at a pace slightly faster than 3 feet per second. It's installed onto a post at the base of a hospital cart, allowing it to pivot and steer.

Aethon plans to retrofit the carts with a user interface that would let a nurse or other operator push a button and send Tug along to its next destination. The machine would operate in only public spaces, not in patients' rooms.

Beyond hospitals, Thorne said, he sees a market for Tugs in airports, on cruise ships and in office settings. He said his firm would seek a bigger round of venture capital at the end of next year.

None of his original Probotics employees -- most of whom were recent college grads with a knack for robotics -- now work at Aethon. Instead, his crew of seven are mostly over 40 and have serious minds for business, Thorne said.

"That was about the excitement of building robots," Thorne said of his earlier venture. "This is not."