Bioinspired Artificial Cockroach Colony Strategy Combined with 2-Type Fuzzy Logic for the Priority-Based Sanitization of Railway Stations.

Recent studies show that in railway stations, there is a high probability of being infected during the periods of a pandemic: passengers gathered in the corridors and platforms of stations, eating at restaurants, and getting on trains facilitate the transmission of diseases. The pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 has spawned an important crisis that has affected the railway sector in a significant way, for example, by inducing people to prefer cars instead of trains. RFI S.p.A., in collaboration with the University of Naples “Federico II”, is studying methods to reduce the risks of contagion in railway stations, and robotics is demonstrated to be very helpful in attacking this issue. In this study, we propose a multi-robot online sanitization system that exploits the information about the position of people. The new method combines the Bioinspired Artificial Cockroach Colony Strategy with the 2-type Fuzzy Logic to coordinate together a team of robot sanitizers. The solution’s performances are compared with those of four different methods deployed in the same scenario, using real data shared by RFI S.p.A., showing better results.