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And get repaired, and we get them back online as soon as possible. >> this is kind of a dinosaur in the industry. you have to trouble shoot a lot. a lot of times electronics don't fail outright. they get glitchy, and it's had 23 years to get glitchy. >> senior agv technician bruce adams runs on-site repair shop. >> we have parts for that. it's basically the electronics that are obsolete. they don't make them anymore. we're doing constant maintenance. >> this is pretty brutal environment for electronics. you can hear them bumping and grinding down the guide path over crumbling expansion joints....

>> what they do is they deliver food, supplies, clothing, linen to the housing units here at santa rita jail. we're a half mile fence to fence, so it would take a lot of inmates, a lot of the inmate labor, a lot of deputies to supervise the inmates to transport those items to the units so these robots do it for us. we're the only facility i know that actually has this kind of a system. it runs is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. >> the agvs utilize a wire-guided navigation system which is built into two miles of track running between all the jail's housing units and service areas. the series...

Unlike most large urban jails that are located in the heart of downtown, santa rita is nestled among foothills. some 30 miles away from the tough oakland streets where most of its inmates were taken into custody. mornings here often begin shrouded in pacific coast fog. and then something else that makes this place unique slowly breaks through -- the jail's robotic workforce. >> a lot of inmates will look at them, and the first thing they ask is, are they a coffin? >> when i first saw that, it actually scared me. i thought they was shipping bodies out of here. i thought i was going to get kille...

Battery area and go out for one service around the jail. and then they will return to the battery area to get a quick charge, usually about three minutes, and it's ready to go. >> they deliver about 12,000 meals a day. this is a custom design that was designed specifically for the sheriff's department. and they're designed in this shape so they fit underneath the food carts. >> santa rita robots. this is how our meals are brought to us. >> some inmates even foresee a day when robots might just replace some other common fixtures at the jail. >> pretty soon they're going to have robots popping u...

Through the tunnels are 24 automated guided vehicles, or agvs. around here, they're more commonly referred to as robots. ♪ they transport thousands of meals, tons of laundry and countless supplies throughout a jail facility that's a half a mile in length and a quarter mile in width. while the system appears futuristic, it's actually more than two decades old and was nearly doomed from the beginning. >> the company that installed the system went bankrupt after they installed it here at santa rita jail. so we went ahead and hired on some of their engineers and maintenance people and all the pa...