But almost anyone would call it cutting edge.

For the last month senior citizens at the Jordan Oaks Retirement Community have been taking part in a N.C. State University robotics study.

Three students from the school’s engineering school tested how residents responded to a robot delivering them medicine and other essentials throughout the day.

“Everyone liked our robot,” said Prithima Mosaly, 30, one of the students involved in the project.

Mosaly said she sees great potential in such robots, such as in hospitals affected by the nursing shortage, where the robots could perform routine tasks.

It was Jordan Oaks residents, and not Mosaly and fellow students Biwen Zhu, 23, and Tao Zhang, 25, who actually named the robot.

Its official designation is PeopleBot, and it’s manufactured by a U.S. company based in New Hampshire.

The robot’s circular rolling base supports two slim poles that reach up about waist high to another circular base, on which can sit a screen where messages can be displayed.

A laptop served as the screen in the students’ experiment.

Underneath the top base are a pair of pincers that can grab and retrieve items like medicine containers.

“I think it has some potential,” said Glen Niebur, 89, one of the 24 residents who took part in the three-week study.

What the students studied was not so much about how the robot worked, but how people responded when the students tweaked different factors of its delivery methods.

Did people like a computer generated voice or a recorded human voiced? That was one test.

People liked the human voice better.

Or, did people like it when there was no voice at all, and a screen simply told people that their medicine had been delivered?

People still liked the voice, Mosaly said.

The students programmed a map of Jordan Oaks’ floor plan into the robot and it was then able through sonar sensor vision to deliver the medicine to the program participants independently.

“It’s something different,” Mark Wilson, one of the managers at Jordan Oaks said of why they wanted to participate in the program.

He said that volunteerism and different types of opportunities for mental exercise were part of what Jordan Oaks staffers tried to stress at the facility, located off Penny Road.

What next for PeopleBot? The students will write and then publish a report about their results.

Mosaly said the reports will be useful for manufacturers trying to develop such robots for the near future.