COVID surveillance robot: Monitoring social distancing constraints in indoor scenarios

Observing social/physical distancing norms between humans has become an indispensable precaution to slow down the transmission of COVID-19. We present a novel method to automatically detect pairs of humans in a crowded scenario who are not maintaining social distancing, i.e. about 2 meters of space...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2021-12, Vol.16 (12), p.e0259713
Main Authors: Sathyamoorthy, Adarsh Jagan, Patel, Utsav, Paul, Moumita, Savle, Yash, Manocha, Dinesh
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Biology and Life Sciences
Cameras
Closed circuit television
Computer engineering
Control
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 - prevention & control
COVID-19 - transmission
COVID-19 - virology
Electronic surveillance
Engineering and Technology
Environmental Monitoring - instrumentation
Environmental Monitoring - methods
Epidemics
Fever
Health aspects
Humans
Lidar
Medicine and Health Sciences
Methods
Norms
Photography
Physical Distancing
Physical Sciences
Research and Analysis Methods
Robotics
Robots
SARS-CoV-2 - isolation & purification
Security
Security management
Software
Television
United States
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Summary:Observing social/physical distancing norms between humans has become an indispensable precaution to slow down the transmission of COVID-19. We present a novel method to automatically detect pairs of humans in a crowded scenario who are not maintaining social distancing, i.e. about 2 meters of space between them using an autonomous mobile robot and existing CCTV (Closed-Circuit TeleVision) cameras. The robot is equipped with commodity sensors, namely an RGB-D (Red Green Blue-Depth) camera and a 2-D lidar to detect social distancing breaches within their sensing range and navigate towards the location of the breach. Moreover, it discreetly alerts the relevant people to move apart by using a mounted display. In addition, we also equip the robot with a thermal camera that transmits thermal images to security/healthcare personnel who monitors COVID symptoms such as a fever. In indoor scenarios, we integrate the mobile robot setup with a static wall-mounted CCTV camera to further improve the number of social distancing breaches detected, accurately pursuing walking groups of people etc. We highlight the performance benefits of our robot + CCTV approach in different static and dynamic indoor scenarios.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0259713