Robot Disinfects Greater Boston Food Bank | Hacker News Reader

Robot Disinfects Greater Boston Food Bank

news.mit.edu

103 pointsr_singh39 comments

I'm highly skeptical of their area coverage claims. The amount of UV-C insolation required to effectively disinfect a surface is substantial. The UVD Robots require 10-15 minutes to disinfect a single hospital room [1]; SmartGuardUV claims 1000 linear feet per 8 hours [2]; and we've modified our safety & security robots to do disinfect elevator panels, doors, & other heavy interaction points, which requires several minutes of exposure to be effective [3].

You might be able to disinfect 10,000 sqft of space in 8 hours. But the MIT robot doing 4k sqft in sub-30 minutes is highly suspect.

[1] http://www.uvd-robots.com/

[2] http://smartguarduv.com/specifications/

[3] https://cobaltrobotics.com/

I don't think anyone doubts that MIT can build a robot that can navigate a factory or that they can attach UV lights to it. It would be more compelling if they measured the efficacy of the disinfecting.

I'm pretty aware of this space (I work in healthcare and did my Masters in contamination of hospital environments). There are a number of companies that sell these units specifically for patient rooms. There was one that include 4 sensors that you placed in the corners of the room. They would detect the amount of UVC light reaching them and adjust the 'clean time' to allow enough UVC to reach all corners. As for the effectiveness of UVC light on pathogens, that's pretty well known.

I suspect you are looking further, and asking if using a tool like this actually reduces infections in a place like this food bank. I suspect no. For one, coronavirus (and other resp viruses) don't live well on surfaces, especially when going from varying environments (refrigerated storage, delivery truck, someones house). Additionally our environment is covered with a lot of (mostly) harmless bacteria, such as Bacillus sp. Bacillus can be worrisome for people with no immune system, but for general population it won't do anything.

I personally think UVC equipment has utility in specific use cases, such as patient rooms, but in grocery stores, food banks etc it won't do much. In those situations, its mostly about close person to person contact.

Would this have an impact on transmission rates if a virus did allow for airborne transmission?

I wouldn't put a ton of weigh to the recent reports of 300 physicians asking the WHO to categorize it as an airborne virus. If it were truly an airborne virus it wouldn't be a very good one. The main source of transmission is close contact with positive patients. If it were airborne we would see a ton more cases (or atleast a ton more unknown source cases). For example, in my province, Alberta, we have 8300 confirmed cases. Only 800 or so are from unknown sources, all the other cases have known links to previous cases [1]. If this were airborne, you would expect many more unknown cases since people would pick it up in grocery stores etc and we wouldn't be able to track it back to the known case.

1. alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_medium=sem&utm_campaign=Covid19&utm_term=data&utm_content=v1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwupD4BRD4ARIsABJMmZ8cO5v1TFH7D0uHfjhcZ9aNdMhvWcOdJLqY5_hude3dLqrE1V_HgToaAi_KEALw_wcB

Back to your question though, if it were airborne, vapourize products or UVC would work against it but you would have to disinfect after a positive person were present. Given air currents, and air exchange rates in most buildings, a positive person wouldn't leave behind enough of a viral load to affect someone that far past their presence.

Disinfecting any airborne particles would seem the bigger advantage no?

Coronavirus stays suspended in the air for hours. UVC disinfection affects those suspended articles, which surface cleaning does not.

>Coronavirus stays suspended in the air for hours.

In controlled lab environments. Also, it likely doesn't stay in loads high enough to cause infection. Any airborne virus will be affected by volume displacement, air currents, air exchanges in addition to things like UV light from the sun, humidity and temperature changes. If I were asked to pick a disinfection method, I would not take disinfecting the air into my consideration.

There’s some evidence it happens in the real world too. In the very early days of the pandemic first there was a case in China where an infected but asymptomatic person went to church and sat in a pew. That person left the church and a different person who later sat in the same spot became infected.

That case was mentioned in a popular paper with about 8 others I recall. One big issue is that they all occured pretty early on when testing wasn't so wide spread. So there's also a good chance it was just a concidence and they were actually exposed to someone else.

This is one issue with the media. That paper, with less than 10 case reports of asymptomatic and potential airborne spread was spread much more rapidly than the WHO report which reviewed ~70k Chinese cases and most spread within household contacts.

The problem with actually measuring that is that the narrative becomes less compelling when supplemented with actual data. Lots of these projects are basically replicating what worked in industry (or was determined not to work) without even paying attention to the industry results. MIT has a whole PR pipeline constantly touting amazing results (and some of them truly are) but they tend to overemphasize how useful these things would truly be if applied at scale.

The incentive isn't to build something that is successful. The point is that the people involved are proving they can A) go through the engineering motions or B) showing the world how they can analyze and draw conclusions from the data where A is for undergrads and B is for grad students.

None of the people working on this are primarily invested in the widget's efficacy (though I'm sure they all would rather see the widget work than not work). The participants are primarily invested in building the widget in the manner they need to to check the boxes required to get their piece of paper that says MIT at the top.

This incentive structure plagues basically every widget that comes out of a university engineering program/lab/department.

This is great for our time, but I worry about the long term effects on the immune system of us living in what are going to be Hyper sterilized environments everywhere we go. (And breathing ultra clean air too)

You can balance it out by not being so sterilized in your own home, that something you can control.

Not really since you won't be able to effectively replicate the diversity of a natural environment - an environment like what you'd need to eventually build defenses against.

Why is a food bank warehouse a "natural environment", but a house is not?

You can sterilize a mall at 9am, but it won't be clean for long. There will still be plenty of germs about.

Some of the modern wisdom rings true again. Go outside and get some sunlight and exercise. Dig in the garden. Keep pets and hug them. All have benefits for subtle reasons.

If this disinfects similar to how sunlight would, maybe it's not so bad

Our homes, cars, backyards, etc. aren't likely to be sterilized in this fashion. Plenty of immune challenges to keep our systems busy.

The only side effect of living cleaner so far (although this is still disputable) is not having parasites anymore and not having immunity suppressing effect they have on your system. This still is net benefit though since parasitic diseases take a toll on the body.

problem is immune system has been tuned to develop with parasites and malfunctions without them.

Hence auto-immune diseases.

Is this robot dangerous to be exposed to? I'm under the impression that UV-C is very dangerous to eyesight.

Side note/digression: the Greater Boston Food Bank can provide somewhere between 3-4 meals for people in need per dollar donated. They are my local foodbank and I've been giving as generously as I can during COVID times. I encourage you to do the same with your local foodbank. Food banks can achieve synergies with grocery chains and food wholesalers that individuals cannot. Your dollars go a long way there!!

> I'm under the impression that UV-C is very dangerous to eyesight.

Yes, among other things. It also has negative side effects on the surface it's cleaning. But there's some interesting IP in the space to maximize the effectiveness while minimizing time and energy used. Not all UV-C is the same.

Far UVC is supposedly safe for humans.

> To continuously and safely disinfect occupied indoor areas, researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center have been investigating far-UVC light (222 nm wavelength). Far-UVC light cannot penetrate the tear layer of the eye or the outer dead-cell layer of skin and so it cannot reach or damage living cells in the body.

https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/far-uvc-light-safely-kil... ("Far-UVC Light Safely Kills Airborne Coronaviruses")

It destroys living cells, and is very very dangerous. People should not be in the same room when these robots are cleaning. It should be treated similar to poison gas.

I'm disappointed that it's remotely driven by a human.

From the article:

> As a first step, the team teleoperated the robot to teach it the path around the warehouse — meaning it’s equipped with autonomy to move around, without the team needing to navigate it remotely.

Humans just have to set waypoints. It's no roomba though.

Imagine that thing just fucking bumping into everything over and over to navigate....

I think Far-UVC light is going to be the next generation method of general santization. Far-UVC light is neither harmful to skin nor the eyes, making it safe for general use. I don’t believe it creates ozone either.

I bought a couple of UVC light bulbs early in the pandemic and used them early on but found it extremely hard to use, especially because of the ozone generated. Also because it’s light, it doesn’t cover everything unless you move the object around. I think there’s a lot of promise though so it’s something I’m looking forward to.

Line of sight of course as you mention is the big drawback compared with something like ozone which can get into nooks and crannies.

There is also vaporized hydrogen peroxide that is used to disinfect surfaces. Doesn't have the same shadow effect that UVC does.

I really hope 222nm uvc will catch on and people in the future will catch cold and flu much less often than we do.

What do you think about using ozone generator to disinfect items that might have contact with the virus, like groceries or mail?

Ozone is a lung irritant and damages plastic, you've gotta be careful with using it around your home on a regular basis. Maybe inside a sealed container?

That was my thinking. I basically built something like that. I bough small ozone generator that has a pump, inlet and outlet (it was designed for bubbling ozone through water). I put both inlet and outlet inside large cardboard box and when I run it I put the whole box outside because the box is not sealed and small leaks or venting it at the end would release ozone into my apartment which as you say is lung and throat irritant. I haven't notice any damage to plastic. It may have some effect on glue on the duct tape I used to modify the box.

I'm running the generator for 10-15 minutes and then let the stuff sit in generated ozone for additional 20 minutes. But I have no idea if I'm improving my security or just performing security theater for my own amusement.

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