Robot Development and Path Planning for Indoor Ultraviolet Light Disinfection
This work addresses the need for affordable and efficient disinfection solutions in indoor environments, particularly relevant post-COVID-19, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing robotic and navigation technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of high costs and inefficiency in robotic ultraviolet C (UVC) light disinfection for indoor settings by proposing an inexpensive robotic platform with a novel algorithm for optimal irradiation locations, reducing disinfection time by roughly 30% and increasing coverage by a factor of 35% compared to static light placement.
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).