During a pandemic every surface is a potential threat, a welcoming host for infectious disease. Hand-washing and chemical cleaning products are some protection, but in larger spaces, the effort to keep every surface clean is prohibitive.

Now a team in New England has produced a robot that can patrol a vast warehouse, bathing surfaces in UV-C light and so obliterate the coronavirus

The team is MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), working in collaboration with Ava Robotics and the Greater Boston Food Bank, whose warehouse was used as a test case.

The approach uses a custom UV-C light fixture designed at CSAIL that is integrated with Ava Robotics’ mobile robot base. The results were encouraging enough that researchers say that the approach could be useful for autonomous UV disinfection in other environments, such as factories, restaurants, and supermarkets.

The complete robot system is capable of mapping the space — in this case, GBFB’s warehouse — and navigating between waypoints and other specified areas. In testing the system, the team used a UV-C dosimeter, which confirmed that the robot was delivering the expected dosage of UV-C light predicted by the model.

Image credit: Alyssa Pierson MIT CSAIL