Design and Implementation of a Robotic System for Oropharyngeal Swab Sampling Application.

The Oropharyngeal (OP) swab sampling is a routine, simple and effective method for the detection of respiratory infectious diseases, especially when a large-scale infectious disease outbreak occurs, such as the newly experienced COVID-19. The traditional manual OP swab sampling process is full of difficulties, such as the high demand for professional medical staff, the risk of cross-infection, and the inflexibility of sampling time, etc., making the efficient implementation of this sampling method particularly critical. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel OP swab sampling robot system to assist the OP swab sampling task. The dual-stage series-parallel hybrid manipulator component is driven by four flexible shafts with torsion properties, which guarantees the completion of sampling tasks in the narrow space of the oral cavity. Accurate sampling point location information is provided through sensor calibration and location recognition algorithms based on deep learning, and the entire sampling task is implemented using a visual-tactile fusion control system. The preliminary experiments verified the completion and feasibility of the sampling task of the OP swab sampling system, and provided a prototype for the OP swab sampling tasks.