Robots are being increasingly used in the fight against highly-infectious diseases such as Ebola, MERS, and SARS-COV-2. Many of the robots that are being used employ ultraviolet lights mounted on a mobile base to inactivate the pathogens. However, these lights are often mounted in a fixed configuration and do not provide adequate decontamination of horizontal surfaces, which can be a major source of cross-contamination. In the paper, we describe the design, implementation, and testing of an Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI) system implemented on a mobile manipulation robot. A human supervisor designates a surface for disinfection, the robot autonomously plans and executes an end-effector trajectory to disinfect the surface to the required certainty, and then displays the results for the human supervisor to verify. We also provide some background information on UVGI and describe how we constructed and validated mathematical models of Ultraviolet (UV) radiation propagation and accumulation. Finally, we describe our implementation on a Fetch mobile manipulation platform, and discuss how the practicalities of implementation on a real robot affect our models.
翻译:机器人正越来越多地被用于防治埃博拉、MEERS和SARS-COV-2等高传染性疾病。许多使用机器人的机器人使用在移动基地安装的紫外线灯来使病原体停止活动。然而,这些灯往往安装在固定的配置中,不能对横向表面进行充分的净化,而横向表面可能是交叉污染的主要来源。我们在文件中描述了在移动操纵机器人上实施的紫外线辐照(UVGI)系统的设计、实施和测试情况。一个人类监督员指定了消毒表面,机器人自主地计划并实施一种终端效应弹道,将表面消毒到必要的确定性,然后展示结果,供人类监督员核实。我们还提供了一些关于紫外线辐射传播和累积的背景资料,并描述了我们如何构建和验证紫外线辐射传播和累积的数学模型。最后,我们描述了我们在移动操纵机器人平台上实施的情况,并讨论了在真正机器人上实施的可行性如何影响我们的模型。