Background
This project was funded through the ARM Institute’s call for projects to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and help the U.S. Department of Defense respond to future pandemics and other disasters.
The ARM Institute rapidly responded to the Department of Defense’s need to address COVID-19 by forming numerous national teams, drawing from diverse industries and technologies to address the myriad of supply chain shortages. This is highlighted by a few of the key statistics listed below:
- Rapid contracting with 45 days from the Project Call release to project start
- Projects executed in 12 months
- 13 states and Puerto Rico engaged
- 23 unique organizations participated across the nine projects
Objective
Reduce the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases in warehouses through autonomous disinfection.
Technical Approach
Logistics and support operations have played a vital role in supporting the nation by supplying medical supplies and essential goods to millions of Americans. To control the spread of COVID-19 in these facilities, more frequent and reliable disinfection is required. This project will develop an autonomous warehouse disinfection system that can automatically navigate, locate, and disinfect heavily touched surfaces and potentially contaminated areas. This process minimizes the human role in potentially harmful disinfecting procedures while reducing costs.
Impact
This application reduced system setup time and effort through the autonomous collection of a map, an intuitive operator user-interface for general users, and a portable operation interface that is accessible from any browser.
The system also ensured a safe and healthy working environment with minimal impact on operations through automated disinfecting routines using autonomous navigation and robust visual perception, the use of a scalable platform to augment disinfection capabilities of human janitorial staff, and consistent and precise spraying of known high-touch surfaces to reduce transmission of pathogens.
The system also developed reusable and scalable technology modules by leveraging both open-source and commercially-available software and the demonstration of a relationship to, and coexistence with, other commercial products.
Participants
Principal Investigator: Siemens Corporation Corporate Technologies
Project Team: FedEx Corporation, Yaskawa Motoman