Fighting COVID: An Autonomous Indoor Cleaning Robot (AICR) Supported by Artificial Intelligence and Vision for Dynamic Air Disinfection

Due to the sever circumstances in the global pandemic, there has been an immense need for disinfectant robot technology. This pandemic has made people much more aware about the severity of virus transmission in public areas. This prompts society to be much more aware of the need to maintain a clean environment. The purpose of this paper is to present the design principles of an Autonomous Indoor Cleaning Robot (AICR) developed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in indoor environments such as small shops and office settings. Its main purpose is to proactively disinfect the air and maintain a clean breathing environment by actively targeting populated areas with the use of a vision system, using Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM) technology. Currently there are other air disinfection products on the market also making use of a combination of a High-Efficiency Particulate Absorbing (HEPA) air purifier and Ultra Violet (UV) light to kill airborne viruses like the Coronavirus. However, all of these are stationary with lack of intelligence machines that have to be kept or manually wheeled from room to room. The device proposed in the paper is a fully autonomous air purifying device capable of going to certain critical regions of the indoor environment to disinfect the air in that area without any human interaction. The stationary purifiers should be much more powerful covering a larger area which makes them very expensive. In contrast, the developed autonomous air purifier needs much less power consumption compared to static purifiers, with the advantage of intelligently and dynamically learning the status of the room using the information captured from the occupancy, itself, and the environment.