# Development of Robot-Assisted Untact Swab Sampling System for Upper Respiratory Disease
## 5 Conclusions  
In this paper, we have proposed a new telerobotic system to prevent the infection of medical staff during upper respiratory sample collection. The proposed robotic system is composed of a slave robot and two master devices. Specifically, an optimized slave robot structure for upper respiratory sample collection is proposed. The kinematic structure is based on a rotary Stewart platform to allow the swab to be moved in 6 degrees of freedom within the facial area. The top plate of the slave robot supports the swab insertion unit, and the base hole of the slave robot provides a window for the insertion of the NP swab into the nostril of the subject. The slave robot is equipped with a wide-angle camera for the magnified imaging of the patient's facial area and transferred as an image stream to the master site. The operator at the master site controls the slave robot and visually determines the position and orientation for swab insertion by looking at the transferred images of the patient's face.  
The kinematic structure of the master device is identical to that of the slave robot (a rotary Stewart platform), allowing the master operator to intuitively control the motion of the slave robot. The insertion and removal of the swab into and from the nostril are implemented by means of a swab insertion unit, which rotates a pair of rollers to push and pull the swab holder. As the counterpart to this unit, the master system includes a swab insertion device to control the swab insertion unit remotely; thus, the master operator can move the swab holder of the slave robot at the same speed desired for swab insertion. The swab holder also has a force sensor to sense the force generated when the swab touches the target. This allows the force measured during swab insertion to be monitored at the master site.  
The developed system was not validated through clinical trials yet. However, the applicability of the proposed system was proved by the experiments of workspace, tracking accuracy, and virtual target sampling in the posterior nasopharyngeal wall of head phantom model. The experimental results also show that the proposed system is suitable to realize \"untact\" swab sampling for upper respiratory disease and that it could probably reduce the risk of infection and fatigue of medical staff in the event of mass infection.  
[PERSON] initiated the study, designed and produced the system, and wrote the manuscript, [PERSON]-[PERSON] is a coinitiator of this study and gave important medical and clinical advice and revised the manuscript, [PERSON] helped write manuscript and assisted experiments with [PERSON] and [PERSON]. [PERSON] helped design the master manipulator and analyze the experimental results. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This work was supported by the institutional research project of Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (No. NK226D-KIMM) and the National Research Council of Science & Technology (NST) grant by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. CAP-18-01-KIST).  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.