To ensure the safety of maintenance workers involved in the fight against in COVID-19 pandemic at hospital wards, a local software company, Propeller Technologies, has developed two new robots that will reduce the risk of infection for them.
The robots are the latest in the line of automated assistants by the company, which had supplied two humanoids to help doctors in Tiruchi’s Mahatma Gandhi Memorial General Hospital (MGMGH) in March. “After we got involved in the efforts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, we realised that the hospital cleaning staff were most vulnerable to infection due to the nature of their job. So we decided to manufacture robots that would take care of their riskier duties,” Mohamed Aashik Rahman, CEO, Propeller Technologies, told The Hindu .
Zafi Clean is a robot that can be programmed to spray the interiors and outer campus of hospitals with a payload of 20 litres of disinfectant. It also has a detachable mop stick that can take care of cleaning duties inside COVID-19 wards.
The second robot is Zafi Sterilse, which is equipped with ultraviolet (UV) radiation lamps that can be used to sanitise COVID-19 wards for 4 hours, in a 1,000 metre radius.
Both the products were developed with partial funding from SASTRA Deemed University and will be given free of cost to government hospitals in Tiruchi, Thanjavur, Chennai and Nagapattinam.
“It is difficult to fix the prices of these robots, because raw material vendors have hiked their rates during the pandemic,” said Mr. Rahman.
Manufacturing during the lockdown has also been a challenge, he said. “For basic nuts and bolts, we were given requisition letters by the authorities allowing us to request local suppliers to open their stores for us. And in the absence of courier services, many of our team members had to personally travel by road to gather the required parts from places like Bengaluru, Madurai and Coimbatore,” he added.
The company has manufactured 38 robots for the COVID-19 therapy so far. “This may be our last set of robots for the pandemic containment effort. We are hoping to return to our original core sector – educational robots – soon,” said Mr. Rahman.
