Design and Development of a New Autonomous Disinfection Robot Combating COVID-19 Pandemic

We present the design of an autonomous mobile disinfection robot using HPV for indoor disinfection based on SLAM and ROS. The developed robot system was deployed and tested in real indoor environments, including laboratory, library, hospital, hotel, etc. The results of examination show that the developed disinfection robot has its effectiveness in combating COVID-19. The first stage work of the authors on autonomous disinfection robot has been reported in this paper. The efficiency of disinfection has been verified by the prototype in real situation. In the future, more detailed work needs to be done in next stage, such as improving testing method, applying more powerful atomizer to reduce disinfection time, optimizing path planning combined with disinfection model and enhancing the robot ability by redesigning the structure as well as adding other components like RGB-D camera. The ongoing work also include integrating UV-C lamp into the robot system as an alternative or backup method.