Covy: An AI-powered Robot for Detection of Breaches in Social Distancing

We present Covy -- a robotic platform that promotes social distancing during pandemics like COVID-19. Covy features a novel compound vision system that enables it to detect social distancing breaches up to 16m away. Covy navigates its surroundings autonomously using a hybrid navigation stack that combines Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)and a probabilistic localization method. We built the complete system and evaluated Covy's performance through extensive sets of experiments both in simulated and realistic environments. Amongst others, our results show that the hybrid navigation stack is more robust compared to a pure DRL-based solution.