Advanced sensing and automation technologies

Abstract

In the context of social distancing, various sensing and automation technologies can bring key roles in providing intelligent social distancing scenarios. In this chapter, we present overviews and state-of-the-art applications of emerging sensing and automation technologies including ultrasound, inertial sensor, visible light, and thermal. These four technologies can provide small-to-large coverage, sufficiently low deployment and operational costs, and high accuracy as well as privacy for indoor and/or outdoor environments. Specifically, ultrasound technology that leverages periodical ultrasonic beacons (UBs) can be utilized to keep distance among people, real-time monitoring in public buildings, and mobile robot navigation in indoor environments. Inertial sensor technology, which contains a gyroscope and accelerometer, is useful to recognize positions of pedestrians for keeping distance and perform automation using autonomous vehicles, e.g., medical robots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The use of visible light coming from the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) can also provide low-cost crowd monitoring system as well as a navigation assistance system in a large-scale indoor area, and smart traffic control among vehicles on the roads. In a low-light condition, thermal-based system using infrared and imaging camera can be used to control distance among people, physical contact tracing, and real-time traffic monitoring over long distances. To this end, each emerging sensing/automation technology has unique features that are expected to be the potential solution for specific social distancing scenarios. In the following sections, we discuss the aforementioned sensing/automation technologies and their scenarios for social distancing applications in more detail.