Scenario‐Based Evaluation of Commercially Available Cleaning Robots for Collection of Bacillus Spores from Environmental Surfaces |
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| Authors: | Sang Don Lee M Worth Calfee Leroy Mickelsen Matt Clayton Abderrahmane Touati |
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| Institution: | 1. Office of Research and Development, United States Enivronmental Protection Agency;2. National Homeland Security Research Center, Office of Rearch and Development, United States Environmental Protection Agency;3. United States Environmental Protection Agency;4. ARCADIS;5. ARCADIS‐US Corporation |
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| Abstract: | The cleaning robots, a vacuum‐based robot (R2) and a wetted‐wipe‐based robot (R4), were evaluated in this study to determine their effectiveness for sampling Bacillus atrophaeus spores. The tests were designed to evaluate the benefit of robot sampling on large areas with two different contamination scenarios: a high‐concentration, low spatial extent contamination (hot spot) and a low concentration, high spatial extent contamination (widely dispersed). The hot spot tests were conducted with the high spore contamination (approximately 107 colony forming units CFUs]) on a limited area (30.5 cm × 30.5 cm), 2 percent of the entire test. The widely dispersed tests were conducted with approximately 0.1 CFUs/cm2 for floor laminate and approximately 10 CFUs/cm2 for carpet surfaces. The widely dispersed tests distributed spores across the test surface and covered approximately 40 percent of the entire test area. The test results showed that both robots successfully sampled a large quantity of spores from carpet and floor laminate surfaces for both test scenarios. Robot performance is discussed in the context of currently used surface sampling methods. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.* |
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