Reconfiguring and ramping-up ventilator production in the face of COVID-19: Can robots help?
This addresses ventilator shortages for healthcare systems during pandemics, but it is incremental as it applies existing robotics to a new crisis context.
The study tackled the shortage of ventilators during COVID-19 by exploring human-robot teams to ramp up production, resulting in a model and design guidelines evaluated through simulation.
As the COVID-19 pandemic expands, the shortening of medical equipment is swelling. A key piece of equipment getting far-out attention has been ventilators. The difference between supply and demand is substantial to be handled with normal production techniques, especially under social distancing measures in place. The study explores the rationale of human-robot teams to ramp up production using advantages of both the ease of integration and maintaining social distancing. The paper presents a model for faster integration of collaborative robots and design guidelines for workstation. The scenarios are evaluated for an open source ventilator through continuous human-robot simulation and amplification of results in a discrete event simulation.