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The Role of the Hercules Autonomous Vehicle During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Autonomous Logistic Vehicle for Contactless Goods Transportation

Since early 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly across the world. As at the date of writing this article, the disease has been globally reported in 223 countries and regions, infected over 108 million people and caused over 2.4 million deaths (https://covid19.who.int/, accessed on Feb. 17, 2021). Avoiding person-to-person transmission is an effective approach to control and prevent the pandemic. However, many daily activities, such as transporting goods in our daily life, inevitably involve person-to-person contact. Using an autonomous logistic vehicle to achieve contact-less goods transportation could alleviate this issue. For example, it can reduce the risk of virus transmission between the driver and customers. Moreover, many countries have imposed tough lockdown measures to reduce the virus transmission (e.g., retail, catering) during the pandemic, which causes inconveniences for human daily life. Autonomous vehicle can deliver the goods bought by humans, so that humans can get the goods without going out. These demands motivate us to develop an autonomous vehicle, named as Hercules, for contact-less goods transportation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The vehicle is evaluated through real-world delivering tasks under various traffic conditions.