  Robots are being increasingly used in the fight against highly-infectious
diseases such as Ebola, MERS, and SARS-COV-2. Many of the robots that are being
used employ ultraviolet lights mounted on a mobile base to inactivate the
pathogens. However, these lights are often mounted in a fixed configuration and
do not provide adequate decontamination of horizontal surfaces, which can be a
major source of cross-contamination. In the paper, we describe the design,
implementation, and testing of an Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI)
system implemented on a mobile manipulation robot. A human supervisor
designates a surface for disinfection, the robot autonomously plans and
executes an end-effector trajectory to disinfect the surface to the required
certainty, and then displays the results for the human supervisor to verify. We
also provide some background information on UVGI and describe how we
constructed and validated mathematical models of Ultraviolet (UV) radiation
propagation and accumulation. Finally, we describe our implementation on a
Fetch mobile manipulation platform, and discuss how the practicalities of
implementation on a real robot affect our models.
