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

The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) has caused mortality and morbidity worldwide Oropharyngeal-swabs (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-DOFs rigid-flexible coupling (RFC) robot to assist the COVID19 OP-swab sampling This robot composes of a visual system, a UR5 robot arm, a micro pneumatic actuator (MPA), and a force sensing system The robot is expected to reduce risk and free up the clinical staff from the long-term repetitive sampling work through remote sampling Compared with a rigid sampling robot, the developed force-sensing RFC robot can facilitate OP-swab sampling procedures in a safer and softer way Additionally, a novel varying-parameters zeroing neural network-based optimization method is also proposed for motion planning of the 9-DOFs redundant manipulator The developed robot system is validated by OP-swab sampling on both oral cavity phantoms and volunteers IEEE

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