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An artist’s rendition of the experiment setup. | Source: Chen Y-X, Pan C-Y, Chen B-Y, Jeng S-W, Chen C-H, Huang J-J, et al
Unmanned floor automobiles (UGVs) may also help battle dengue-carrying mosquitoes in Taiwan sewers, based on a brand new examine printed in PLOS Neglected Tropic Diseases by Wei-Liang Liu of the Taiwan National Mosquito-Borne Diseases Control Research Center and colleagues.
In the examine, researchers mixed a crawling robotic, wire-controlled cable automotive, and real-time monitoring system right into a UGV that takes high-resolution, real-time photos of areas inside Taiwan’s sewer system. Specifically, the UGV focused lined roadside ditches that had been suspected to be hotspots for mosquitoes carrying dengue fever.
Schematic diagrams of the UGV tools, which features a crawling robotic, a monitoring system, and a wire-controlled cable automotive. | Source: Chen Y-X, Pan C-Y, Chen B-Y, Jeng S-W, Chen C-H, Huang J-J, et al
Dengue fever is an infectious illness brought on by the dengue virus that’s unfold by a number of mosquito species which might be a part of the genius Aedes, which may additionally unfold chikungunya, yellow fever, and zika. The World Health Organization estimates that 390 million individuals worldwide are contaminated with dengue fever manually.
Sewers make simple breeding grounds for Aedes mosquitoes, and the most typical mosquito monitoring applications wrestle to watch and analyze the density of mosquitoes in hidden areas, like lined ditches.
The robotic system created by the researchers was deployed in 5 administrative districts in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan from May to August 2018. The UGVs discovered traces of Aedes mosquitoes in levels from larvae to adults in 20.7% of inspected sewers.
Using the knowledge gathered from the robots, researchers might comply with up with extra prevention management measures, together with pesticides of high-temperature water jets, in sewers the place mosquitoes had been discovered.
After these interventions, the gravitrap index (GI), a metric that measures the grownup mosquito inhabitants density close by, dropped from 0.62 to 0.19.
“The widespread use of UGVs can potentially eliminate some of the breeding sources of vector mosquitoes, thereby reducing the annual prevalence of dengue fever in Kaohsiung City,” the authors mentioned.