Human-Supervised Automation Test Cell to Accelerate Personal Protective Equipment Manufacturing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The shortage of medical-grade personal protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers is an important issue during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The demand placed on textile manufacturers to rapidly produce products that adhere to a set of standard quality assurance requirements has increased dramatically, leading to increased burden on quality assurance floors and national testing labs. Standardized testing of protective equipment is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process that requires human operators to perform tasks that can be automated using various technologies, such as collaborative robots and computer vision systems. The tests we focus on involve evaluating surgical masks and protective materials for blood penetration resistance, flammability, and liquid barrier performance. This work introduces a test cell designed to accommodate human operators in completing various quality assurance tests for protective equipment. The test cell is comprised of custom-designed cases containing test specimens to facilitate robot manipulation and cameras to monitor and characterize the test results. We demonstrate how the system can reduce the workload and reliance on human operators at no expense to the quality assurance process. Based on validation test results and user experience, it is predicted that the human operator will only have to prepare cases with test specimens and handle infrequent failures that occur within the system, without compromising overall completion time. We envision that this system will relieve the strain on textile manufacturing processes requiring human labor to repeatedly perform simple tasks.