The Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital (VMTH) has acquired a robot for sanitizing operating rooms.

Tru-D or "Trudy," is a stationary bot that uses 28 bulbs and eight ultraviolet C (UVC) centers to destroy resistant infection-causing bacteria that can cling to walls, floors, tables and other surfaces.

Source: Texas A&M VMTH

In order to manually sanitize operating rooms where certain bacteria like those that cause staph infections can persist for months — even after cleaners have been applied to disinfect the space — everything is removed from the room. Researchers explained that the entire operating room is disinfected, from the walls to the ceiling and everything in between.

While the researchers report that such tasks can require as many as three operating room techs roughly 30 minutes to accomplish this, Trudy can reportedly free those three techs up for other tasks such as spending time with patients.

Once placed in an operating room, Trudy’s 360° sensors estimate how large the space is and subsequently how long the disinfection cycle should take — with most cycles taking about 15 to 20 minutes for sanitizing smaller rooms and taking 30 to 40 minutes to sanitize larger rooms.

So far, Trudy has been used hundreds of times to disinfect operating rooms, exam rooms, isolation rooms and intensive care units in both large animal and small animal teaching hospitals.