Design and Control of a Highly Redundant Rigid-Flexible Coupling Robot to Assist the COVID-19 Oropharyngeal-Swab Sampling
This addresses the problem of protecting healthcare workers from virus exposure during repetitive sampling tasks, though it appears incremental as an adaptation of existing robotic and sensing technologies.
The authors developed a 9-degree-of-freedom rigid-flexible coupling robot to assist with COVID-19 oropharyngeal-swab sampling, aiming to reduce infection risk for clinical staff and validated it on phantoms and volunteers.
The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) has caused mortality and morbidity worldwide. Oropharyngeal-swab (OP-swab) sampling is widely used for the diagnosis of COVID-19 in the world. To avoid the clinical staff from being affected by the virus, we developed a 9-degree-of-freedom (DOF) rigid-flexible coupling (RFC) robot to assist the COVID-19 OP-swab sampling. This robot is composed of a visual system, UR5 robot arm, micro-pneumatic actuator and force-sensing system. The robot is expected to reduce risk and free up the clinical staff from the long-term repetitive sampling work. Compared with a rigid sampling robot, the developed force-sensing RFC robot can facilitate OP-swab sampling procedures in a safer and softer way. In addition, a varying-parameter zeroing neural network-based optimization method is also proposed for motion planning of the 9-DOF redundant manipulator. The developed robot system is validated by OP-swab sampling on both oral cavity phantoms and volunteers.