  The outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) has caused mortality
and morbidity worldwide. Oropharyngeal-swab (OP-swab) sampling is widely used
for the diagnosis of COVID-19 in the world. To avoid the clinical staff from
being affected by the virus, we developed a 9-degree-of-freedom (DOF)
rigid-flexible coupling (RFC) robot to assist the COVID-19 OP-swab sampling.
This robot is composed of a visual system, UR5 robot arm, micro-pneumatic
actuator and force-sensing system. The robot is expected to reduce risk and
free up the clinical staff from the long-term repetitive sampling work.
Compared with a rigid sampling robot, the developed force-sensing RFC robot can
facilitate OP-swab sampling procedures in a safer and softer way. In addition,
a varying-parameter zeroing neural network-based optimization method is also
proposed for motion planning of the 9-DOF redundant manipulator. The developed
robot system is validated by OP-swab sampling on both oral cavity phantoms and
volunteers.
