During the COVID-19 pandemic, surface disinfection using prevailing chemical disinfection methods had several limitations. Due to cost-inefficiency and the inability to disinfect shaded places, static UVC lamps cannot address these limitations properly. Moreover, the average market price of the prevailing UVC robots is huge, approximately 55,165 USD. In this research firstly, a requirement elicitation study was conducted using a semi-structured interview approach to reveal the requirements to develop a cost-effective UVC robot. Secondly, a semi-autonomous robot named UVC-PURGE was developed based on the revealed requirements. Thirdly, a two-phased evaluation study was undertaken to validate the effectiveness of UVC-PURGE to inactivate the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the capability of semi-autonomous navigation in the first phase and to evaluate the usability of the system through a hybrid approach of SUPR-Q forms and subjective evaluation of the user feedback in the second phase. Pre-treatment swab testing revealed the presence of both Gram-positive and Gram-Negative bacteria at 17 out of 20 test surfaces in the conducted tests. After the UVC irradiation of the robot, the microbial load was detected in only 2 (1D and 1H) out of 17 test surfaces with significant reductions (95.33% in 1D and 90.9% in 1H) of microbial load. Moreover, the usability evaluation yields an above-average SUPR-Q score of 81.91% with significant scores in all the criteria (usability, trust, loyalty, and appearance) and the number of positive themes from the subjective evaluation using thematic analysis is twice the number of negative themes. Additionally, compared with the prevailing UVC disinfection robots in the market, UVC-PURGE is cost-effective with a price of less than 800 USD. Moreover, small form factor along with the real time camera feedback in the developed system helps the user to navigate in congested places easily. The developed robot can be used in any indoor environment in this prevailing pandemic situation and it can also provide cost-effective disinfection in medical facilities against the long-term residual effect of COVID-19 in the post-pandemic era.INDEX TERMS COVID-19, UVC robot, medical robotics, infection control, disinfection methods.
Human-assistance rovers have a broad prospect in the field of space robotics, as a significant number of organizations and researchers have been investing in the design and development of sophisticated rovers for planetary exploration. In order to promote research and development in the design of nextgeneration MARS rovers, an annual University Rover Challenge (URC) is hosted by the MARS Society in the United States. In this study, we highlight the design and development process of several novel subsystems of a human-assistance planetary exploration rover and their successive integration in the prototype named PHOENIX, which is a rover that participated in the URC 2021. First, a detailed requirement elicitation has been conducted, for designing a conceptual framework for a rover capable of planetary exploration. Secondly, the design and development process has been detailed for five basic subsystems (power, communication, primary-manipulator, chassis with drive, processing) and two mission-specific subsystems (scientific exploration and autonomous navigation), as well as their successive integration into the rover. Afterwards, a detailed evaluation study has been conducted in order to validate the performance of the developed system. Terrain traversability, autonomy in navigation, and sophisticated task execution capabilities have been evaluated individually within this study. Additionally, the capability of the rover in detecting bio-signatures from soil samples using a novel Multiple Bio-molecular Rapid Life Detection (MBLDP-R) protocol has also been evaluated. The developed scientific exploration subsystem is capable of detecting the presence of life from soil samples with a 92% success rate, and from rock samples with a success rate of 93.33%.
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