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A Disinfecting Robot Fights COVID-19 in the Classroom

When COVID lockdowns began in 2020, students at Purdue University found an inventive way to disinfect both the air and surfaces of large indoor spaces: An autonomous robot.

“We don’t know of any other commercial robots that use air filtration for disinfection,” said Richard Voyles  , the Daniel C. Lewis Professor of Robotics in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute. “If you’re trying to disinfect a room where humans are present, we’ve shown that this system is more effective than any other option.”

Topics:
Automation Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 The project starts in the summer of 2020,  to contribute something to relieve the   COVID-19 pandemic. There has been a lot of  projects doing disinfection robots based on   ultraviolet light. It only applies to rooms  without occupants. So we start to think, well,   what can we do with occupied rooms? -This is a problem related with   fluid mechanics, right? When somebody  cough, this plume of turbulent flow can   transport this virus. The idea originally was to  integrate this in a real application, like the   using of robots to disinfect inside classrooms.  So we did this interdisciplinary project using   the information from fluid mechanics to robotics. -First step, we try to simplify the problem by   focusing on what happens in a classroom scenario,  where students are sitting still and facing the   same direction. And then we try to predict where  particles will be, recognizing humans in the  

    00:00:58 camera and avoiding any possible collisions. -But additional to that,   we have this filtration module. -So we have an annulus filter,   with a grate around it. But we have also  this kind of Bernoulli section that is in   charge to make this air go in a converging way. -Normally we see the HEPA filter sitting in one   place. So here this is something that's moving and  it's sucking in air and there's a lot of particles   that can be captured all at once, compared to  some other systems. There were two problems: air   disinfection and surface disinfection. The  micro jets which would be at the bottom,   so they would be doing the lower level  disinfection. The part that I worked on   was the electrostatic jet, which is on that  robotic arm that sits on top of the robot.  -In a room with human activity, the layout may  change, the people's behavior may change, they  

    00:01:49 are scattered around, they may move around. And  it's hard for a traditional fixed simulation to   predict how the situation will evolve. However,  if we have smart robots equipped with sensors,   and we can actually see, for example,  where humans really are in real time,   I think that will be exciting progress. -I'm really really proud of this project   because it was applied to real world problems.  When I really see that information really can   work to save lives like in this problem of  COVID-19, I really was excited about that.