Disinfection robot developed to halt COVID-19 spread
A team of USC master’s students created a disinfection robot called LASER-D to use on COVID-19 prevention. See video.
Said master’s student Ruiqi Wang: “This is the first time I worked on a team of complete strangers. It was pretty hard to bond without any face-to-face interactions, but our shared and ambitious goal helped us to bond. We ended up being a really great team.”
Even remotely, students were exposed to skill areas they counted themselves novices in. Anthony Nguyen worked on the simulation software and robot’s operating system. He said he felt like with a big vision and time constraints, they had to hit the ground running as a team. “As a mechanical engineering student, I had no background in C++ coding or anything like that. I was lucky—there was open source code and a lot of resources I could use to learn. The project relied on a lot of coding—we had to use what was available and then engineer further solutions.”