Publication
An Autonomous Navigation System for Cost-Effective Mobile Disinfection Robots
| Summary: | The Covid-19 pandemic evinced that some viruses can rapidly spread and infect a lot of people and that, in these cases, the need to disinfect becomes urgent. The pandemic also emphasized the importance of conducting disinfection procedures in a safe, fast, and sustainable way. Autonomous mobile robots are starting to be part of our daily reality; there are already robots cleaning houses, serving tables, and helping in warehouses. Robots allow humans to concentrate on complex tasks that need continuous adaptation and human judgment, while robots perform repetitive, tedious, and sequential tasks. This dissertation focuses on achieving safer, faster, and more sustainable disinfection using UV-C radiation lights in autonomous mobile robots. It does so while guaranteeing this project has the lowest budget possible in order to be accessible to smaller businesses. The latter will be able to not only quickly disinfect hospital rooms and corridors, but will also protect humans from contacting with various diseases as they disinfect multiple rooms. It will do so in a much more sustainable way, as UV-C lights can be used for over 12000 hours, compared to single-use materials like gloves, cloths, and masks needed to disinfect the rooms. In this dissertation, a system is developed with four major blocks: Map, Algorithm, Navigation, and Hardware. This system has the ability to map a floor, determine where the robot should stop to turn on the disinfection lights and guide the robot through those stopping points. This enables the disinfection of parts of the environment such as rooms, corridors, operation rooms, etc. |
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| Main Authors: | Rodrigues, Lourenço Aires de Sousa Silveira |
| Subject: | disinfection UV-C radiation autonomous mobile robots ROS2 autonomous navigation path planning |
| Year: | 2023 |
| Country: | Portugal |
| Document type: | master thesis |
| Access type: | open access |
| Associated institution: | Universidade Nova de Lisboa |
| Language: | English |
| Origin: | Repositório Institucional da UNL |
| Summary: | The Covid-19 pandemic evinced that some viruses can rapidly spread and infect a lot of people and that, in these cases, the need to disinfect becomes urgent. The pandemic also emphasized the importance of conducting disinfection procedures in a safe, fast, and sustainable way. Autonomous mobile robots are starting to be part of our daily reality; there are already robots cleaning houses, serving tables, and helping in warehouses. Robots allow humans to concentrate on complex tasks that need continuous adaptation and human judgment, while robots perform repetitive, tedious, and sequential tasks. This dissertation focuses on achieving safer, faster, and more sustainable disinfection using UV-C radiation lights in autonomous mobile robots. It does so while guaranteeing this project has the lowest budget possible in order to be accessible to smaller businesses. The latter will be able to not only quickly disinfect hospital rooms and corridors, but will also protect humans from contacting with various diseases as they disinfect multiple rooms. It will do so in a much more sustainable way, as UV-C lights can be used for over 12000 hours, compared to single-use materials like gloves, cloths, and masks needed to disinfect the rooms. In this dissertation, a system is developed with four major blocks: Map, Algorithm, Navigation, and Hardware. This system has the ability to map a floor, determine where the robot should stop to turn on the disinfection lights and guide the robot through those stopping points. This enables the disinfection of parts of the environment such as rooms, corridors, operation rooms, etc. |
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