Easy-to-Deploy Combined Nasal/Throat Swab Robot With Sampling Dexterity and Resistance to External Interference

Robots have been used extensively in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic since its outbreak. One prominent direction is the use of robots for swab sampling, which not only solves the shortage of medical staffs, but also prevents them from being infected during face-to-face sampling. However, a massive deployment of sampling robots is still not achievable due to their high costs, safety concerns, deployment complexity, and so on. In this letter, we propose a flexible, safe, and easy-to-deploy swab robot in a compact bench-top system. The robot can perform nasal/throat swab sampling tasks as dexterous as a human manual operation. The bio-mimetic rigid interior and soft exterior design guarantee the sampling robot with both flexibility and safety. Furthermore, the integration of 3-D fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based shape sensor and multi-axis force sensor may enhance the control performance. A dedicated constrained compliance control (CCC) algorithm was developed to tackle the unexpected interactions during sampling, which ensures the validity and safety of the sampling under disturbance. Various experiments are conducted to validate our system and prove its feasibility, flexibility, high safety, and efficiency for both nasal/throat swab sampling tasks. The proposed system is promising to be massive duplicated for robotic swab sampling.