Fully Automatic Nasopharyngeal Swabs PCR Testing Robot Using Visual Perception and Physical Contact Feedback

This paper presents a new dual-arm mobile medicine robot that operates nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs for upper respiratory tract sampling. This robotic system was designed to replace the delicate and complex mucus sampling operations of medical personnel. To this end, we designed a new hardware system. We developed advanced 3D vision and force sensing hybrid perception algorithms for the robot to accurately locate the nostril position, manipulate the swab into the nostril and then carefully advance the swab along the inferior nasal tract to the designated sampling position in the posterior nasal cavity. The swab is rotated to sample the mucus, after which the swab is withdrawn to end the process. In addition, the whole sampling process is fully automatic and performed by a robot, including grabbing the swab, opening the culture tube, folding the swab in the culture tube after sampling and sealing it, disinfecting the robot, etc. This mobile robot body is also installed with a human-robot-interaction module with voice interaction, which is linked to the Internet and can scan the code to bind the sampler’s ID information to the culture tube. The experimental results of more than 8,000 volunteer experiments indicate that the proposed robot PCR sampling results are as accurate as those of humans. Questionnaires show that our robot NP swab sampling is more comfortable than manual sampling.