Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed serious challenges in multiple perspectives of human life. To diagnose COVID-19, oropharyngeal swab (OP SWAB) sampling is generally applied for viral nucleic acid (VNA) specimen collection. However, manual sampling exposes medical staff to a high risk of infection. Robotic sampling is promising to mitigate this risk to the minimum level, but traditional robot suffers from safety, cost, and control complexity issues for wide-scale deployment. In this work, we present soft robotic technology is promising to achieve robotic OP swab sampling with excellent swab manipulability in a confined oral space and works as dexterous as existing manual approach. This is enabled by a novel Tstone soft (TSS) hand, consisting of a soft wrist and a soft gripper, designed from human sampling observation and bio-inspiration. TSS hand is in a compact size, exerts larger workspace, and achieves comparable dexterity compared to human hand. The soft wrist is capable of agile omnidirectional bending with adjustable stiffness. The terminal soft gripper is effective for disposable swab pinch and replacement. The OP sampling force is easy to be maintained in a safe and comfortable range (throat sampling comfortable region) under a hybrid motion and stiffness virtual fixture-based controller. A dedicated 3 DOFs RCM platform is used for TSS hand global positioning. Design, modeling, and control of the TSS hand are discussed in detail with dedicated experimental validations. A sampling test based on human tele-operation is processed on the oral cavity model with excellent success rate. The proposed TOOS robot demonstrates a highly promising solution for tele-operated, safe, cost-effective, and quick deployable COVID-19 OP swab sampling.
Highlights
T HE outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic leads to profound challenges in people’s daily lives in different fields lastingly and globally [1]
We present soft robotic technology is promising to achieve robotic OP swab sampling with excellent swab manipulability in a confined oral space and works as dexterous as existing manual approach
We present soft robotic technology is a viable solution for safe and effective robotic OP swab sampling
Summary
T HE outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic leads to profound challenges in people’s daily lives in different fields lastingly and globally [1]. Using soft robotic wrist and hand to replace the human operator in handling existing disposable swabs could be a more practical approach to promote soft robotic sampling in the near term. We present soft robotic technology is promising to achieve robotic OP swab sampling with excellent swab manipulability in a confined oral space and works as dexterous as existing manual approach. The remaining of this paper is organized as follows: Section II introduces the overall system design of TOOS robot, TSS hand, and tele-operation framework; Section III discusses the kinematics and stiffness modeling of the TSS hand; Section IV presents the complete tele-operation framework of the robot; Section V provides experimental validation of the tele-operation framework, TSS hand interaction force, swab sampling success rate, and human user demonstration; Section VI presents the discussion and conclusion. The design intention is to replicate the physical joints and sensory perception of a human operator that are involved in manual sampling process
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