With their choice to design and create an “Autonomous Disinfection Robot” able to react to special isolation environments, a group of DTU students won a prize for Outstanding Project at the InnovateFPGA Design Contest 2022. They realized their robot with the wish to overcome the limitations of current disinfection practices, improve disinfection quality, and reduce the probability of disease transmission in medicine.
Nguyen Minh Huy at the left, Tran Thi Tuyet Nhung, and Nguyen Ngo Anh Quan at the right
The InnovateFPGA Design Contest 2022, organized internationally by Intel & Terasic corp. (US), is about embedded system design. It is a playground for all, from students and university professors to companies producing embedded systems.
The contest was launched in July 2021 and is divided into four regions: Americas, Europe–Middle East, China, and Asia–Pacific. 135 teams entered the InnovateFPGA Design Contest 2022 in the Asia–Pacific region, coming from countries like India, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka.
The members of the team from DTU were Nguyen Ngo Anh Quan, postgraduate student of Electronic Engineering; Tran Thi Tuyet Nhung, student of Nursing; and Nguyen Minh Huy, student of Business Administration. They received supervision from Profs. Tran Le Thang Dong and Pham Ngoc Quang of the Center of Electrical Engineering and entered the contest with a project for an “Autonomous Disinfection Robot”. The project idea stemmed from the wish to support medics stop the spread of Covid-19 and other diseases that may appear in the future.
The robot is designed with a compact body allowing deployment in any environment, from large hospitals to small clinics. It can move flexibly in many positions in a room to spray disinfectant solution and irradiate germicidal UV rays. The solution nozzles were designed to minimize the consumption of disinfectant solution while ensuring distribution of solution to all locations in a room. FPGA is used to share a part of the mainboard’s mathematical processing, which increases the processing capacity of the system. The robot is equipped with several sterilization modules and automatically matches sterilization solutions to specific sterilization requirements across situations.
Structure of the “Autonomous Disinfection Robot”
Task execution is based on an application that provides travel routes to the robot. These intelligent algorithms allow the robot to move intelligently, select disinfection solutions, and enhance its disinfection capabilities (including re-sterilizing key areas and surrounding disinfection). Method, location, ambient temperature and humidity, sterilization time, time of cumulative use of sterilization components, and disinfectant dosage can be recorded and stored automatically. The robot furthermore automatically collects data on patient body temperature and blood oxygen and sends these data to the Microsoft Azure IoT Hub for treatment monitoring.
“FPGA 2022 is a global competition,” Nguyen Ngo Anh Quan, postgraduate student of Electronic Engineering at DTU, explains the difficulties they encountered when competing. “Therefore, to meet the requirements of the contest and to compete with teams from all over the world, we needed to put in huge efforts with the help and encouragement of the lecturers at the Center of Electrical Engineering. The difficulties in the contest came from gathering data, collecting environmental samples, and learning about and working with modern FPGA programming technology. We were really very happy to be one of the eleven teams to get a prize for Outstanding Project at a contest of global scale. We hope the project will attract the interest of investors, allowing development, production in large numbers, and use in hospitals in Vietnam and abroad.”
The team members testing their “Autonomous Disinfection Robot”
The “Autonomous Disinfection Robot” project met with the high appreciation from the jury for its many useful features. Using robots to replace humans in disinfection activities has many benefits, such as:
? reduction of cost and minimization of exposure of healthcare workers to sources of infection;
? combination of many sterilization options, such as ultraviolet rays and chemical spray;
? ensuring coverage of areas to be cleaned and ensuring cleanliness, disinfectant dosage, and disinfection time meet requirements;
? ability to move to most areas in a clinic through pre-provided path data, and to work at any time of the day and at any time the robot is activated;
? collection of patient health information (body temperature and blood oxygen), patient test samples, and other environmental parameters for patient status monitoring and evaluation.
“Under the guidance of the lecturers at the Center of Electrical Engineering, the students put in a lot of efforts to complete their project,” Center of Electrical Engineering Deputy Director Prof. Tran Le Thang Dong has to say on the students’ efforts during their project research. “I highly welcome the spirit Nguyen Ngo Anh Quan especially worked very hard to learn about more in-depth use of the embedded parts on the FPGA board, which is a precondition for high prizes in this contest. Their achievement is thanks to the unceasing efforts of the participating students, and I can’t fail to mention the concern and hard work to create the good conditions by the DTU Boards of Directors and of Provosts for many years, supporting students in scientific research leading to many outstanding prizes.”
(Media Center)