Hospital Bed Transport Robot: Porters to ABB AMRs

A hospital bed transport robot takes over one of the heaviest routine jobs in a clinic: pushing beds between wards, cleaning rooms, lifts and storage. Every bed move ties up a porter or a nurse, often two of them. This post follows bed moving from wheeled ward beds and porters to powered bed movers and the first hospital courier robots, looks at the autonomous bed mover Neura Robotics announced in autumn 2026, and sets out where ABB's mobile robots could fit. ABB has not announced a bed robot, so that part is a possibility.

Hospital staff wheel a patient on a bed down a glass walled corridor, 2014. Photo: U.S. Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How porters and powered movers shifted hospital beds

Hospital beds were built to be moved long before anyone thought of motors. Beds with adjustable side rails appeared in Britain between 1815 and 1825, and in 1909 Willis Dew Gatch, head of surgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine, designed the three segment adjustable bed that modern beds descend from. A push button electric bed followed in 1945. Wards like the hospital ward in Safad photographed in 1940 were rows of iron frames, and when a patient went to theatre or another floor, porters and nurses pushed the bed there by hand.

A ward in the hospital at Safad, photographed in 1940, with rows of iron framed beds. Photo: Matson Collection, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Wheels made that possible, and modern beds carry lockable castors so they stay put during a transfer and roll when needed. Beds and patients have both grown heavier, though, and pushing that load down long corridors brings a real risk of strain injuries to backs and shoulders. The bed mover maker ePowerTrucks says hospital staff who push beds, stretchers and equipment walk 15 to 20 kilometres a day on average. Its own electric bed transporter clamps a bed by its castors and lets one person drive up to 600 kilograms with a thumb on the controls.

A hospital bed frame on castors, photographed in the 1940s. Photo: Sven Sjöstedt via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first fix was power. Bed movers, battery tugs that attach to a bed and take its weight while a porter steers, came into hospitals, and at University Hospital of South Manchester three MasterMover tugs meant one porter could move a patient bed where two had been needed. Robots arrived for lighter loads first. Joseph Engelberger, who had built the first industrial robots, founded Transitions Research Corporation in 1984, and its HelpMate courier robot started work at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut in 1988. Within a decade more than 100 hospitals ran HelpMates, but they were couriers for small loads, and the beds stayed with the porters.

A Gzunda powered bed mover attached to the end of a hospital bed. Photo: Electrodrive / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Neura's bed robot and the ABB machines that move loads

At the end of September 2026 Neura Robotics, the German maker of cognitive robots, announced a new healthcare unit, Neura HealthTech, and its first product: a flat, omnidirectional mobile robot that slides under an empty hospital bed, lifts it and drives it to the next ward or floor. It turns on the spot to get out of patient rooms, rides the lift, and keeps its safety functions running while it raises the bed. It moves empty beds only, never patients, and it can also carry sterile goods. Neura says that at about 20 moves a day one robot could give a hospital more than 1,300 hours a year back for patient care.

An empty bed parked in a corridor at University Medical Center, New Orleans, 2023. Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The business model is as new as the hardware. Hospitals lease the robots through partners as a service at a fixed monthly rate that covers integration, maintenance and software updates, and each site is checked first against its own corridors, door widths and lift sizes. Neura links the robot to its Neuraverse software so that sensors in the building can dispatch it, and it plans to follow with its MAiRA arms for instrument handling and a service robot called MiPA for patient rooms. The pitch rests on staffing: the World Health Organization expects the EU to be 4.1 million health workers short by 2030.

A hospital delivery robot waiting at a service elevator where robots have priority. Photo: Mikael Häggström / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB has no bed robot, but it already builds the parts of one. Since buying ASTI Mobile Robotics in 2021 it has sold autonomous mobile robots under the Flexley Mover name, and the P604 finds its way through a site with 3D Visual SLAM, building a map from camera images instead of following tape or wires on the floor. In factories these AMRs carry and lift carts, racks and parts between stations. A hospital version would need a lifting top sized for bed frames, lift integration and medical safety approval, so for now it is a possibility rather than a product.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Where autonomous bed moving goes from here

The next step is coordination. A bed robot that knows when an operating theatre or a cleaning room is free can pick up a bed as soon as it is empty, and Neura's plan to connect rooms, devices and robots in one system points that way. ABB has its own healthcare work, with a research hub in Houston and a mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, shown for hospital lab jobs. Programs for robots like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, and our post on hospital delivery logistics covers the lighter loads that couriers carry.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

For homes and care homes, the lesson is smaller. Electric care beds at home rarely need to leave the room, so the use there is more likely a robot that fetches supplies or helps with a transfer than one that moves furniture. In factories the same technology is mature. Mobile robots already slide under racks and carts and lift them, and the safety rules for running them among people, from speed limits to scanner fields, are well understood on shop floors.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603 carrying crates. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, safety and skills. A robot that moves 20 beds a day has to cost less than the porter hours it frees, and Neura's answer is a monthly lease. It has to cope with crowded corridors, visitors, wheelchairs and cluttered lift lobbies without blocking an emergency. And hospital staff need to learn to book, release and recover it when it stops, much as porters once learned to use powered movers. Moving a bed with a patient on it is a much harder step, and Neura has kept it out of scope for this robot.

A modern electric hospital bed raised on its frame, with its control unit and motors visible. Photo: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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