Abstract
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.
Highlights
The COVID-19 (COrona VIrus Disease-19) pandemic has caused significant loss of life around the world due to its high infection rate
We present a method for employing a vision-guided COVID Surveillance robot (CS-robot) and wall-mounted CCTV cameras to monitor scenarios with low to mediumdensity crowds to detect prolonged contact between individuals (Fig 1)
In the absence of CCTV cameras, we demonstrate that our robot monitoring system is effective in detecting breaches and can enforce social distancing in all the cases where breaches are detected
Summary
The COVID-19 (COrona VIrus Disease-19) pandemic has caused significant loss of life around the world due to its high infection rate. One of the best ways to prevent contracting COVID-19 is to avoid being exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have recommended many guidelines including maintaining social or physical distancing, wearing masks or other facial coverings, and frequent hand washing to reduce the chances of contracting or spreading the virus. Several groups have simulated the spread of the virus and shown that social distancing can significantly reduce the total number of infection cases [1,2,3,4,5,6].
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