STTR Phase I: Autonomous Disinfecting Robot for Crowded Spaces

此小企业技术转让（STTR）项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是应对COVID-19大流行。拟议的工作将迅速创造新的自主机器人，用于医院和其他表面传播病原体传播风险高的高流量区域的消毒。这项工作产生的自动消毒系统将填补一个关键的空白，确保医院空间保持消毒，因为医疗保健系统正在努力应对不断变化的COVID-19危机。此外，该解决方案将广泛应用于控制医院获得性感染，每年影响美国超过200万人，总体经济影响为45 B美元。 拟议的自主高灵敏度机器人预计将成功地保持约10，000平方英尺商业空间中的高接触区域可靠地消毒，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，零售等）。在美国. 更快、更有效和有针对性的消毒有可能大大减少这些空间的停机时间和消毒所需的劳动力。 为应对持续的COVID-19危机，STTR第一阶段项目将迅速开发新的机器人系统和算法，使机器人能够在拥挤的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，消除了现有全房间单源紫外线辐射机器人的关键限制，要求房间无人居住。紫外线技术在改善医院的消毒和通过最大限度地减少化学品的使用来降低成本方面具有巨大的前景，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缓解这一限制，开辟紫外线照明在医院消毒中的进一步用途。 为了实现这一目标，该项目将推进机器人技术的关键领域，包括在存在动态障碍物的情况下的同时定位和地图绘制（SLAM）算法，以及在具有不同物体的表面上和人类附近控制手臂。这些努力将推动机器人技术在医疗保健和其他行业应用的科学和实践。该奖项反映了NSF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.