STTR Phase I: Autonomous Disinfecting Robot for Crowded Spaces

这项小企业技术转让项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力在于应对COVID-19大流行。这项工作将迅速创造出新的自主机器人，用于医院和其他高流量区域的卫生处理，这些区域具有表面传播病原体的高风险。在医疗保健系统忙于应对不断演变的COVID-19危机之际，这项努力产生的自主消毒系统将填补确保医院空间保持消毒的关键空白。此外，该解决方案将广泛适用于控制医院获得性感染，每年影响美国200多万人，总体经济影响为450亿美元。拟议的自主高灵巧机器人预计将成功地保持约10,000平方英尺商业空间的高接触区域的可靠消毒，并可适用于超过500亿平方英尺的公共商业空间（办公室，工业，医疗保健，酒店，医疗保健，医疗保健和医疗保健）。零售等)。更快、更高效、更有针对性的清洁有可能大大减少这些空间的停机时间和清洁所需的劳动力。为应对当前的COVID-19危机，STTR第一阶段项目将快速开发新的机器人系统和算法，使机器人能够在拥挤环境中精确导航表面。这种新系统将能够在人类附近进行选择性消毒，消除了现有的全房间单源紫外线辐射机器人要求房间无人居住的关键限制。紫外线技术在改善医院的卫生和通过尽量减少化学品使用来降低成本方面有着巨大的希望，但由于对哺乳动物细胞的不良影响，该技术的应用有限。使用机械臂和聚焦照明的选择性曝光能力将减轻这一限制，开辟紫外线照明在医院卫生方面的进一步应用。为了实现这一目标，该项目将推进机器人技术的关键领域，包括在动态障碍物存在下的同步定位和映射（SLAM）算法，以及在不同物体表面和人类附近的手臂控制。这些努力将推动机器人技术在医疗保健和其他行业的应用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project is to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed work will rapidly create new autonomous robots for sanitization in hospitals and other high-traffic areas with high risk of surface-borne pathogen transmission. The autonomous sanitizing system produced by this effort would fill a crucial void in ensuring hospital spaces are kept sanitized as the health care system scrambles to respond to the evolving COVID-19 crisis. In addition, the solution will be widely applicable in controlling Hospital Acquired Infections, affecting over 2 million people in the US annually, with an overall economic impact of $45 B. The proposed autonomous high-dexterity robots are projected to successfully keep the high-touch areas in about 10,000 square feet of commercial space reliably sanitized and could be applicable to the over 50 billion square feet of public commercial space (office, industrial, healthcare, hospitality, retail, etc.) in the US. Faster, more efficient, and targeted santization has potential to dramatically reduce downtime of these spaces and the labor required for sanitization. This STTR Phase I project, in response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, will rapidly develop new robotic systems and algorithms for robots capable of precisely navigating surfaces in crowded environments. This new system will be capable of selective sanitization in the proximity of humans, removing the key limitation of existing full-room single-source UV radiation based robots requiring the room to be unoccupied. UV light technology has tremendous promise in improving sanitization at hospitals and reducing costs by minimizing chemical use, but the technology has had limited application due to ill effects on mammalian cells. The selective exposure capability with the use of the robotic arm and focused lighting will alleviate that limitation, opening up further uses of UV lighting in hospital sanitization. Toward this goal, this project will advance key areas of robotics, including Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms in the presence of dynamic obstacles, and the control of arms over surfaces with varied objects and in the vicinity of humans. These efforts will advance the science and practice of robotics for applications in healthcare and other industries.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.