Multi-robot Sanitization of Railway Stations Based on Deep Q-Learning

Sanitizing railway stations is a relevant issue especially due to the recent evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this work, we propose a multi-robot approach to sanitize railway stations based on a distributed Deep Q-Learning technique. The framework relies on anonymous information from existing WiFi networks to localize passengers inside the station and to develop a map of possible risky areas to be sanitized. Starting from this map, a swarm of cleaning robots, each one endowed with a robot-specific convolutional neural network, learns how to on-line cooperate inside the station in order to maximize the sanitized area depending on the presence of the passengers.