Summary

Motivations - As COVID-19 is spreading rapidly in many states in the United States, more than 7 million cases have been reported as of late September of 2020, and more than 204,000 people have lost their lives during the pandemic. As of recently, the number of new infected cases, as well as the number of new deaths, have not climbed as much as before, but the virus is in no way contained. The World Health Organization and public health officials in the States believe that wearing masks and maintaining social distancing of 6 feet or more could further help reduce the risk of transmission of the coronavirus.

Goals - We want to dive into the venue where most other inventors stray from due to a lack of funds and profit. We want to build a low cost and effective robot that uses machine learning to algorithmically detect faces of people who are not wearing masks. The robot would then automatically open its storage compartment for the none-mask-wearing person to reach in a fetch a mask. By building such a robot, we can help people raise awareness of the importance of wearing mask, so that they can protect themselves and other people around them from getting into direct contact with the coronavirus. Moreover, by making use of the facial mask-wearing recognition, we may potentially be able to help researchers study human behaviors and predict future disease hot spots before it is too late.