Enhancing Safety of Students with Mobile Air Filtration during School Reopening from COVID-19
Haoguang Yang, Mythra V. Balakuntala, Abigayle E. Moser, Jhon J. Quiñones, Ali Doosttalab, Antonio Esquivel-Puentes, Tanya Purwar, Luciano Castillo
Abstract
The paper discusses how robots enable occupant-safe continuous protection for students when schools reopen. Conventionally, fixed air filters are not used as a key pandemic prevention method for public indoor spaces because they are unable to trap the airborne pathogens in time in the entire room. However, by combining the mobility of a robot with air filtration, the efficacy of cleaning up the air around multiple people is largely increased. A disinfection co-robot prototype is thus developed to provide continuous and occupant-friendly protection to people gathering indoors, specifically for students in a classroom scenario. In a static classroom with students sitting in a grid pattern, the mobile robot is able to serve up to 14 students per cycle while reducing the worst-case pathogen dosage by 20%, and with higher robustness compared to a static filter. The extent of robot protection is optimized by tuning the passing distance and speed, such that a robot is able to serve more people given a threshold of worst-case dosage a person can receive.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2021_enhancingsafetyo,
title = {Enhancing Safety of Students with Mobile Air Filtration during School Reopening from COVID-19},
author = {Haoguang Yang and Mythra V. Balakuntala and Abigayle E. Moser and Jhon J. Quiñones and Ali Doosttalab and Antonio Esquivel-Puentes and Tanya Purwar and Luciano Castillo and Nina Mahmoudian and Richard M. Voyles},
booktitle = {ICRA 2021},
year = {2021}
}