Syrian refugees in Jordan build robot to fight coronavirus
A group of young Syrians in Jordan’s Zaatari camp designed a sanitizing robot to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.
In Jordan's Zaatari refugee camp, a group of five Syrian refugee students built a sanitation robot out of LEGO bricks to help their community prevent a coronavirus outbreak.
The idea came from Marwan al-Zoubi, who sought refuge in Jordan in 2013 after fleeing the Syrian city of Daraa. He began studying robotics in 2019 with the support of the Blumont organization and now teaches children robotics at the UNHCR’s Zaatari Innovation Lab.
The Zaatari camp is home to about 80,000 Syrian refugees. Jordan has 656,733 registered refugees within UNHCR, 124,019 of whom dwell in camps like Zaatari.
“One of the causes of infection with COVID-19 is contact with surfaces, so I had the idea of designing a robot to sanitize one’s hands without the need to touch the sanitizer bottle,” Zoubi told Al-Monitor.
