Remote Control of a Wheeled Robot by Visible Light for Support in Infectious Disease Hospitals

The shortage of medical personnel is now a problem and is expected to worsen in the future. Meanwhile, in the case of infectious diseases such as new coronavirus infections, it is very important that nurses and other medical staff treat patients as remotely as possible, which helps to prevent nosocomial infections and is also important for maintaining the medical system. One way to address these issues is to use mobile robots as assistants to automate the transport of patients and supplies. Wireless communication is necessary to control such robots remotely, but doing so with radio waves is undesirable in the medical field because of the impact on patients and medical equipment. Therefore, this paper proposes a teleoperation system for a wheeled mobile robot using visible light with a camera and an array of LEDs, an approach that affects neither patients nor medical equipment. This paper presents the development of visible light communication for this system by introducing a novel blinking pattern for the receiver and novel light-weight algorithm for the transmitter. According to a wide range of experiments, the proposed teleoperation system performs well enough for the remote control of wheeled robots in hospitals.