Development of a Robotic Arm and End-Effector for COVID-19 Testing

Health-care professionals play an essential role in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Currently, most of the collected Covid-19 specimens are collected manually by health care workers and by using sterile cotton swab. The close contact between the health workers and the patients put them at high risk of being infected. One of approaches toward protecting the health workers, is to reduce the direct contact between the health care workers and the Covid-19 patients through deploying robots. In this study, a robotic system for Covid-19 swab sampling is designed and built. The robotic system consists of a 3 DOF arm, 2 DOF end effector with force sensor, and head holder. The robot is controlled remotely and from a safe distance. The preliminary experimental tests show that the robot is able to position the swab tip at the opening of the nasal cavity with the orientation and location that makes the swab insertion parallel to the palate. A force sensor is integrated in the end effector design to measure the normal contact force between the swab tip and the interior of the nasal cavity. The experimental results show that the normal contact force was successfully controlled and maintained within the acceptable force range, between 0.35N and 0.68N, as reported in literature. Maintaining the contact force within such range is essential in protecting the interior tissue of the nasal cavity from any injury