Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation for Hospital Disinfection using SLAM and Coverage Path Planning
Oscar Antill, Zeyad Yousif Abdoon Al-Shibaany · 2025
Effective sanitation in healthcare settings is essential to mitigating healthcare-associated infections. This study develops and evaluates an autonomous hospital disinfection robot that integrates SLAM-based mapping, efficient navigation, and robust coverage path planning with ChArUco-based visual odometry. The system was tested in hospital-like environments using a simulated TurtleBot3 Waffle equipped with wheel en-coders, a 2D LIDAR, and an RGB camera. The results show that selecting the nearest frontier significantly improves exploration in open and structured layouts, while a random frontier strategy offers advantages in complex environments. Additionally, the Boustrophedon coverage algorithm outperformed the Wavefront method by reducing travel distance, completion time, and computational load. ChArUco-based visual odometry achieved an average positional error of approximately 0.05 m, and a breadthfirst flood-fill algorithm effectively identified high-risk priority zones. Together, these findings demonstrate the potential of the integrated system to reduce manual cleaning burdens, lower operational costs, and minimise infection risks in healthcare facilities.