Can Service Robots Help Best Practices for COVID?

Abstract

We present the design of a mobile robot that delivers hand sanitizer on the Oregon State University campus. The goal is to encourage people to follow the best health practices under COVID-19. The current hardware involves a hands-free hand sanitizer dispenser mounted atop a TurtleBot base. A wizard teleoperates the robot to approach bystanders, communicating via its approach that it would like them to participate. Future work will evaluate what communication modes best serve this goal of distributing hand sanitizer in particular contexts, and consider distributing services to where there is the most human demand.