Luohu district has debuted the world's first full-process automated nasopharyngeal swab sampling robot named the second generation of Pengcheng Qinggeng, which was co-designed and manufactured in Luohu by Moying Robotics and Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society under the coordination of Luohu Hospital Group.
It has the upper body of a humanoid robot (head and arms), a free-moving omnidirectional body (AGV), and a tablet computer that integrates scanning, voice, and video interaction, as well as built-in sampling tubes, swabs, sterile sample storage devices, sterilizing devices and other consumables.
Users scan their health codes through the tablet interface. The robot will automatically bind the nucleic acid sampling tube and identity information and upload it to the public health inspection platform.
The robot uses 3D vision and six-dimensional force control technologies to accurately and quickly take nucleic acid samples from the user's nasopharyngeal swabs. After that, the robot automatically cuts the swab, sterilizes the sample tube, claw, body, and other key components, and then moves to the next sampling point to continue the sampling task.
Based on the previous generation, the new robot has developed a more accurate and stable 3D vision algorithm, optimized the algorithm model of face recognition, and realized the real-time estimation of head posture and accurate localization algorithm of face features.
Moreover, the feature extraction, tracking, and 3D spatial localization algorithms of image and point cloud swabs and human targets are developed respectively in the robot. In arm movement, the robot can imitate the actions of senior nurses for nucleic acid sampling.
Experiments show that the one-time sampling success rate is 85%, and two-time sampling success rate is over 92%. About 82% of the subjects' feelings were similar to or better than those collected by nurses. No serious adverse reactions occurred in the sampled patients, and mild or general adverse reactions were similar to manual sampling.
In addition, the second-generation robot is equipped with multiple security control systems. It uses the robot virtual frame scheme so that subjects can effectively avoid uncomfortable situations during the sample collection. The robot can control the running speed of its arm to ensure that the subjects have enough reaction time to deal with various emergencies during the operation.
