Continuously-deformable and stiffness-tunable soft manipulator achieving unmanned COVID-19 pandemic sampling

Junshi Zhang; Lei Liu; Mingliang Zhu; Dichen Li; Jian Lu

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13731

Continuously-deformable and stiffness-tunable soft manipulator achieving unmanned COVID-19 pandemic sampling

Heliyon. 2023 Feb;9(2):e13731. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13731. Epub 2023 Feb 14.

Authors

Junshi Zhang^{1

2}, Lei Liu¹, Mingliang Zhu³, Dichen Li⁴, Jian Lu⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, 710072, China.
² Research & Development Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shenzhen, Shenzhen, 518063, China.
³ School of Mechanical and Precision Instrument Engineering, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, 710048, China.
⁴ State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, 710054, China.
⁵ Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.

Abstract

In recent years, COVID-19 has spread across the whole world, and manpowered collection of pharyngeal samples undoubtedly increases the possibility of cross-infections. In this article, based on our previous fabricated soft manipulator (Cell Reports Physical Science, 2021, 2, 100600), we performed the COVID-19 sampling on real human volunteers by exploiting a pre-programmed unmanned system. The unmanned sampling system mainly includes a soft manipulator and a rigid motion platform, which are adjusted by pneumatic control box and the motor control modules, respectively. Drawn on the lead-through teaching method, the unmanned sampling of COVID-19 is realized by recording the applied pressure in soft manipulator and the feed motion of rigid platform. This research provides a potential approach for unmanned COVID-19 sampling, solving the risk of cross-infection during manual collection.

Keywords: COVID-19; Lead-through teaching; Soft manipulator; Unmanned sampling.