Design and Analysis of ‘Xenia: The Medi-Assist Robot’ for Food Delivery and Sanitization in Hospitals

Everyday, the exponential rise in the number of patients of Covid-19 being admitted to hospitals have put pressure on the hospital staff. Due to the highly contagious nature of the virus, the hospital staff face a constant risk of getting infected as they are in direct contact with the patients. To help reduce their workload, and to reduce the contact time between the staff and patients, the ‘Xenia: The Medi-Assist Robot’ is designed in this research study. To accomplish this, this novel robot delivers food and medicine trays to the patient's bed and autonomously sanitizes wards after they are vacated. Obstacle avoidance and path planning was implemented with MATLAB-SIMULINK software. For realistic modelling, ROS based simulator Gazebo was used by creating virtual environment of hospital corridors. The Computer Aided Design (CAD) model of the robot had successfully followed virtual path containing waypoints for both the processes i.e. food tray delivery and sanitization. As a result of this research, it is expected that the Medi-Assist robot would be suitable to reduce the spread of Covid-19 in Hospitals and strengthen the health infrastructure of the country.