Design and Control of a Highly Redundant Rigid-Flexible Coupling Robot to Assist the COVID-19 Oropharyngeal-Swab Sampling

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel 9-DOF rigid-flexible coupling robot designed to assist COVID-19 oropharyngeal swab sampling, enhancing safety and reducing risk for clinical staff through advanced control and motion planning.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new highly redundant RFC robot with force sensing and a neural network-based motion planning method for safer, more effective COVID-19 sampling procedures.

Findings

Robot reduces risk to clinical staff during sampling.

Force sensing enables softer, safer sampling.

Validated on phantoms and volunteers.

Abstract

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.