Design and Autonomous Navigation of a New Indoor Disinfection Robot Based on Disinfection Modeling

The COVID-19 pandemic shows growing demand of robots to replace humans for conducting multiple tasks including logistics, patient care, and disinfection in contaminated areas. In this paper, a new autonomous disinfection robot is proposed based on aerosolized hydrogen peroxide disinfection method. Its unique feature lies in that the autonomous navigation is planned by developing an atomization disinfection model and a target detection algorithm, which enables cost-effective, point-of-care, and full-coverage disinfection of the air and surface in indoor environment. A prototype robot has been fabricated for experimental study. The effectiveness of the proposed concept design for automated indoor environmental disinfection has been verified with air and surface quality monitoring provided by a qualified third-party testing agency.