An Autonomous Throat Swab Sampling Robot for Nucleic Acid Test

Abstract

Throat swab sampling is one of the efficient ways for nucleic acid test. However, the manual sampling work has a high risk of cross-infection, hence the development of autonomous throat swab sampling robot becomes necessary. The design of this kind of machine faces several challenging problems, for instance: (1) it requires coordination of multiple manipulators; (2) it requires an efficient pose calculation algorithm to precisely control the motion of manipulators; and (3) it requires an accurate visual segmentation algorithm to detect the region of interest in the oral cavity. Considering the problems mentioned above, we introduce the prototype of the robot in this paper, which combines multiple manipulators coordination with ma-chine vision technologies. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the robot.