Autonomous UV-c Enabled Mobile Rover
In these unprecedented times, it has been impractical to plan any gathering with family or friends, move freely even for work. or get out to get some fresh air. The very sole reason for this problem is the poor covid-norms and sanitization in our country. Now the second wave of covid round the corner, lockdown is not a solution anymore. Hence, we need to innovate and design a solution to tackle this spread of covid by securing our homes, offices and other public places before utilizing them.
The Solution
For a solution to work in India, we need a powerful disinfection method that is fast, cheap and reliable. Ultraviolet radiation is a naturally occurring phenomenon that helps kill 99% of germs and harmful bacteria in our environment through sunlight. Ultraviolet is also known as UV light is quite powerful has a wavelength a little shorter than visible light and hence occurs blue when looked at directly. UV lights grew immensely in popularity and are being heavily used in disinfection of covid-virus but little do people know about its cons.
UV-c band light could kill bacteria and viruses before they get inside us but even their short-term exposure could give you a nasty sunburn. UV lights should always be used in a closed and empty room, away from human contact but little is this rule followed in India. We often see blue-collar workers disinfecting offices with UV lights held in the hand which is a serious threat and can cause many skin diseases.
We at Mars EdPal Instruments Pvt. Ltd. are working on this problem and have devoted our resources to develop an autonomous rover mounted with our custom-designed UV-C Light mechanism. The rover could be operated manually or could be left on its own to cover grounds based on a pre-marked path. The rover could navigate through spaces using its advanced camera systems and AI algorithms and disinfect efficiently without any human intervention which saves time, cost and most importantly lives.
Using Computer Vision and proximity sensors we were able to fully demonstrate a concept for indoor navigation, the rover is functional for 3–4 hours continuously and is able to disinfect without any human contact. Its camera system enables the rover to occasionally look for humans in its vicinity and turns off its UV lamps to minimize exposure. The indoor navigation and human detection algorithms are being run on Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB Ram and 16GB SSD with raspbian stretch.
The rover is able to read the QR codes and dynamically change its course to fit the desired goals. It can shift between a corridor navigation system and a path-following system depending upon the instructions of the QR code.
The rover is fairly easy to implement, there is a single On-Off switch that connects the batteries with the raspberry pi and the sensor systems. It is the operator’s responsibility to make sure the rover’s camera view has the Qr code consisting of the instructions. Otherwise, the rover could be operated in manual mode by the push of a button on its handle. The user has to pre-mark the path and strategically place the Qr codes as per the requirement, although in the final system this step will be done by a team of professionals from Mars EdPal Instruments Pvt Ltd to ensure smooth functioning of the rover.
The rover is under its final stages of development and testing and will be deployed at large warehouses, public spaces like colleges, malls, hospitals etc.