Development of a conversing and body temperature scanning autonomously navigating robot to help screen for COVID-19

TL;DR

This paper presents an autonomous robot capable of navigating, detecting, and conversing with people to measure their temperature for COVID-19 screening, aiming to improve safety and efficiency over manual methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel autonomous robot integrating navigation, face tracking, and thermal scanning to automate COVID-19 temperature screening.

Findings

Successfully developed a robot capable of autonomous navigation and temperature detection.

Implemented face tracking and thermal imaging for accurate temperature measurement.

Provided engineering solutions and recommendations for future commercialization.

Abstract

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the most common symptom displayed by patients has been a fever, leading to the use of temperature scanning as a preemptive measure to detect potential carriers of the virus. Human employees with handheld thermometers have been used to fulfill this task, however this puts them at risk as they cannot be physically distanced and the sequential nature of this method leads to great inconveniences and inefficiency. The proposed solution is an autonomously navigating robot capable of conversing and scanning people's temperature to detect fevers and help screen for COVID-19. To satisfy this objective, the robot must be able to (1) navigate autonomously, (2) detect and track people, and (3) get individuals' temperature reading and converse with them if it exceeds 38{\deg}C. An autonomously navigating mobile robot is used with a manipulator controlled using a face tracking algorithm, and an end effector consisting of a thermal camera, smartphone, and chatbot. The goal is to develop a functioning solution that performs the above tasks. In addition, technical challenges encountered and their engineering solutions will be presented, and recommendations will be made for enhancements that could be incorporated when approaching commercialization.