EarthSense and University of Illinois Win Funding to Develop Robots to Control COVID-19
June 3, 2020. CHAMPAIGN, IL – Responding rapidly to the COVID-19 crisis, EarthSense, Inc. and the University of Illinois have started creating autonomous sanitizing robots to help reduce transmission of COVID-19. Building on their innovative robotics and machine-learning platform, EarthSense aims to deploy robots that can autonomously build maps of hospital rooms and disinfect them using UV light. This technology development effort has won accelerated funding from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research Programs, also known as “America’s Seed Fund”. The Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer Award will enable EarthSense, in collaboration with leading robotics experts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to accelerate adaptation of their robotics, autonomy, and edge analytics technologies to deploy these sanitization robots as soon as possible in hospitals and public spaces.
Prof. Kris Hauser, Associate Professor in Computer Science and Director of the Intelligent Motion Laboratory at UIUC, will collaborate with EarthSense on the project. Prof. Hauser is well known for his influential work in robot autonomy and healthcare robotics. “The EarthSense-UIUC team brings a unique mix of expertise in robotics and manufacturing low-cost and reliable robots at scale” said Prof. Hauser. “There’s a huge opportunity for robots to reduce personnel exposure to pathogens as well as to optimize disinfection coverage. Our experience with healthcare robots combined with EarthSense’s design and manufacturing expertise will enable us to quickly deploy working prototypes in the field.”
“We felt driven to respond to this staggering crisis by accelerating our plan to create products beyond agriculture,” said Girish Chowdhary, co-founder and CTO of EarthSense, Director of the Distributed Autonomous Systems Laboratory, and Donald Biggar Willet Faculty Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. “We are making every effort to rapidly deploy our autonomous COVID sanitizing robots. The accelerated funding from the National Science Foundation is a critical validation of our approach to help manage COVID-19 and future diseases.”
“The world needs to mobilize all possible resources to help healthcare professionals treat the unprecedented spike in people needing critical medical care. Autonomously sanitizing high-touch surfaces without “baking the whole room” will significantly improve our ability to help control COVID-19,” said EarthSense co-founder and CEO Chinmay Soman. “More generally, these smart disinfection products from EarthSense will also be valuable for reducing the spread of hospital acquired infections (HAIs) of drug resistant pathogens–which have an economic cost of over $50 Billion every year in the US.”
The unprecedented human and economic costs of COVID-19 clearly show a need for dedicating significantly more resources to predict, prevent, and manage the devastating effects of pandemics. EarthSense autonomous sanitizing robots will also be useful in offices, schools, and other public areas to reduce community transmission and help relax social distancing measures sooner.
The timely support from America’s Seed Fund will enable EarthSense to rapidly create products and technologies for autonomous sanitising robots to help address HAIs, the COVID-19 pandemic, and to improve resilience to future pandemics.
About EarthSense, Inc.: EarthSense has created an innovative platform that tightly integrates autonomous robotics, machine-learning, and management. Their first robot—TerraSentia—is helping accelerate crop improvement and agricultural product development by providing large quantities of accurate in-field plant trait data rapidly and at low cost, especially for under-canopy traits that cannot be obtained by other technologies. Responding to the COVID-19 crisis, EarthSense has accelerated the creation of products for Healthcare. For more information about EarthSense, please visit earthsense.co.
About the NSF’s Small Business Programs: America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $1.75 million to support research and development (R&D), helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.1 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. For more information, visit seedfund.nsf.gov.