Robot Development and Path Planning for Indoor Ultraviolet Light Disinfection
Abstract
Regular irradiation of indoor environments with ultraviolet C (UVC) light has become a regular task for many indoor settings as a result of COVID-19, but current robotic systems attempting to automate it suffer from high costs and inefficient irradiation. In this paper, we propose a purpose-made inexpensive robotic platform with off-the-shelf components and standard navigation software that, with a novel algorithm for finding optimal irradiation locations, addresses both shortcomings to offer affordable and efficient solutions for UVC irradiation. We demonstrate in simulations the efficacy of the algorithm and show a prototypical run of the autonomous integrated robotic system in an indoor environment. In our sample instances, our proposed algorithm reduces the time needed by roughly 30\% while it increases the coverage by a factor of 35\% (when compared to the best possible placement of a static light).
Cite
@article{arxiv.2104.02913,
title = {Robot Development and Path Planning for Indoor Ultraviolet Light Disinfection},
author = {Jonathan Conroy and Christopher Thierauf and Parker Rule and Evan Krause and Hugo Akitaya and Andrei Gonczi and Matias Korman and Matthias Scheutz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.02913},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Preliminary version of this paper will be published in the ICRA 2021 conference