Swab Testing Robotic Arm

This review paper describes the development of robotic arm swab testing system for COVID-19 disease and the evaluation of its safety and efficacy for the oropharyngeal-swab testing method in coronavirus detection. In this system, machine learning algorithms are used to detect the cotton swab and the region of swabbing, i.e., the back of the human throat. It employs a serially connected microcontroller-based robotic arm to pick up the cotton swab stick and perform the swab test by swabbing the cotton swab stick into the patient's throat and dropping the cotton swab stick back into the transportation test tube using a gripper. The main objective behind introducing this system is to reduce the risk to the lives of healthcare workers who perform swab testing due to aerosol from patients during the process of testing. Also the quality of manual swab testing is inconsistent among different collectors, which may lead to misdiagnosis. The replacement of manual testing by a robot has the potential to avoid close contact between healthcare workers and patients, and thus reduce the risk of Corona virus infection during testing.