This paper reviews 262 reports appearing between March 27 and July 4, 2020, in the press, social media, and scientific literature describing 203 instances of actual use of 104 different models of ground and aerial robots for the COVID19 response. The reports are organized by stakeholders and work domain into a novel taxonomy of six application categories, reflecting major differences in work envelope, adoption strategy, and human-robot interaction constraints. Each application category is further divided into a total of 30 subcategories based on differences in mission. The largest number of reported instances were for public safety (74 out of 203) and clinical care (46), though robots for quality of life (27), continuity of work and education (22), laboratory and supply chain automation (21), and non-clinical care (13) were notable. Ground robots were used more frequently (119) than aerial systems (84), but unlike ground robots, aerial applications appeared to take advantage of existing general purpose platforms that were used for multiple applications and missions. Of the 104 models of robots, 82 were determined to be commercially available or already existed as a prototype, 11 were modifications to existing robots, 11 were built from scratch. Teleoperation dominated the control style (105 instances), with the majority of those applications intentionally providing remote presence and thus not amenable to full autonomy in the future. Automation accounted for 74 instances and taskable agency forms of autonomy, 24. The data suggests areas for further research in autonomy, human-robot interaction, and adaptability.
Objective: The status of human-robot collaboration for assembly applications is reviewed and key current challenges for the research community and practitioners are presented. Background: As the pandemic of COVID-19 started to surface the manufacturers went under pressure to address demand challenges. Social distancing measures made fewer people available to work. In such situations, robots were pointed at to support humans to address a shortage in supply. An important activity where humans are needed in a manufacturing value chain is assembly. HRC assembly systems are supposed to safeguard co…
Social isolation is one of the negative consequences of a pandemic like COVID-19. Social isolation and loneliness are not only experienced by older adults, but also by younger people who live alone and cannot communicate with others or get involved in social situations as they used to. In such situations, social companion robots might have the potential to reduce social isolation and increase well-being. However, society's perception of social robots has not always been positive. In this paper, we conducted two online experiments with 102 and 132 participants during the self isolation periods …
We examine the implementation of social robots in real-world settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we analyze the areas in which social robots are being adopted, the roles and tasks being fulfilled, and the robot models being implemented. For this, we traced back and analyzed 240 deployment cases with 86 different social robots worldwide that have been adopted since the coronavirus outbreak. We found that social robot adoption during this period was strongly related to the use of this technology for crisis management. The social robots' capacity to perform the roles of liaison …
University of Southern Denmark（南丹麦大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Cambridge Biomakespace（剑桥生物制造空间）
As the COVID-19 pandemic expands, the shortening of medical equipment is swelling. A key piece of equipment getting far-out attention has been ventilators. The difference between supply and demand is substantial to be handled with normal production techniques, especially under social distancing measures in place. The study explores the rationale of human-robot teams to ramp up production using advantages of both the ease of integration and maintaining social distancing. The paper presents a model for faster integration of collaborative robots and design guidelines for workstation. The scenario…
Designing Socially Assistive Robots: Exploring Israeli and German Designers' Perceptions
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Affective & Cognitive Institute, Offenburg University（奥芬堡大学情感与认知研究所）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Brigham Young University（杨百翰大学）
This record contains the proceedings of the 2020 Workshop on Assessing, Explaining, and Conveying Robot Proficiency for Human-Robot Teaming, which was held in conjunction with the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This workshop was originally scheduled to occur in Cambridge, UK on March 23, but was moved to a set of online talks due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article analyses data collected on 338 instances of robots used explicitly in response to COVID-19 from 24 Jan, 2020, to 23 Jan, 2021, in 48 countries. The analysis was guided by four overarching questions: 1) What were robots used for in the COVID-19 response? 2) When were they used? 3) How did different countries innovate? and 4) Did having a national policy on robotics influence a country's innovation and insertion of robotics for COVID-19? The findings indicate that robots were used for six different sociotechnical work domains and 29 discrete use cases. When robots were used varied g…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Amazon Robotics（亚马逊机器人公司）
This paper describes the methodology and outcomes of a series of educational events conducted in 2021 which leveraged robot swarms to educate high-school and university students about epidemiological models and how they can inform societal and governmental policies. With a specific focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, the events consisted of 4 online and 3 in-person workshops where students had the chance to interact with a swarm of 20 custom-built brushbots -- small-scale vibration-driven robots optimized for portability and robustness. Through the analysis of data collected during a post-event su…
Medical robots can play an important role in mitigating the spread of infectious diseases and delivering quality care to patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods and procedures involving medical robots in the continuum of care, ranging from disease prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, and homecare have been extensively deployed and also present incredible opportunities for future development. This paper provides an overview of the current state-of-the-art, highlighting the enabling technologies and unmet needs for prospective technological advances within the next 5-10 years. We …
Maintaining social distancing norms between humans has become an indispensable precaution to slow down the transmission of COVID-19. We present a novel method to automatically detect pairs of humans in a crowded scenario who are not adhering to the social distance constraint, i.e. about 6 feet of space between them. Our approach makes no assumption about the crowd density or pedestrian walking directions. We use a mobile robot with commodity sensors, namely an RGB-D camera and a 2-D lidar to perform collision-free navigation in a crowd and estimate the distance between all detected individuals…
This conceptual paper overviews how blockchain technology is involving the operation of multi-robot collaboration for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics. Robots are a promising technology for providing many tasks such as spraying, disinfection, cleaning, treating, detecting high body temperature/mask absence, and delivering goods and medical supplies experiencing an epidemic COVID-19. For combating COVID-19, many heterogeneous and homogenous robots are required to perform different tasks for supporting different purposes in the quarantine area. Controlling and decentralizing multi-robot p…
This paper argues that training of future Roboticists and Robotics Engineers in Computer Science departments, requires the extensive direct work with real robots, and that this educational mission will be negatively impacted when access to robotics learning laboratories is curtailed. This is exactly the problem that Robotics Labs encountered in early 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic. The paper then turns to the description of a remote/virtual robotics teaching laboratory and examines in detail what that would mean, what the benefits would be, and how it may be used. Part of this vision…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）
The paper discusses how robots enable occupant-safe continuous protection for students when schools reopen. Conventionally, fixed air filters are not used as a key pandemic prevention method for public indoor spaces because they are unable to trap the airborne pathogens in time in the entire room. However, by combining the mobility of a robot with air filtration, the efficacy of cleaning up the air around multiple people is largely increased. A disinfection co-robot prototype is thus developed to provide continuous and occupant-friendly protection to people gathering indoors, specifically for …
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）
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. …
As telecommunications technology progresses, telehealth frameworks are becoming more widely adopted in the context of long-term care (LTC) for older adults, both in care facilities and in homes. Today, robots could assist healthcare workers when they provide care to elderly patients, who constitute a particularly vulnerable population during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous work on user-centered design of assistive technologies in LTC facilities for seniors has identified positive impacts. The need to deal with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes the benefits of this approach, but a…
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the most common symptom displayed by patients has been a fever, leading to the use of temperature scanning as a preemptive measure to detect potential carriers of the virus. Human employees with handheld thermometers have been used to fulfill this task, however this puts them at risk as they cannot be physically distanced and the sequential nature of this method leads to great inconveniences and inefficiency. The proposed solution is an autonomously navigating robot capable of conversing and scanning people's temperature to detect fevers and help screen for CO…
TU Dortmund University（多特蒙德工业大学）；Communication Networks Institute（通信网络研究所）
The integration of small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) will empower novel smart-city applications and services. After the unforeseen outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the public demand for delivery services has multiplied. Mobile robotic systems inherently offer the potential for minimizing the amount of direct human-to-human interactions with the parcel delivery process. The proposed system-of-systems consists of various complex aspects such as assigning and distributing delivery jobs, establishing and maintaining reliable communication …
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
COVID-19 pandemic has become a global challenge faced by people all over the world. Social distancing has been proved to be an effective practice to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Against this backdrop, we propose that the surveillance robots can not only monitor but also promote social distancing. Robots can be flexibly deployed and they can take precautionary actions to remind people of practicing social distancing. In this paper, we introduce a fully autonomous surveillance robot based on a quadruped platform that can promote social distancing in complex urban environments. Specifically, to…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Nasopharyngeal (NP) swab sampling is an effective approach for the diagnosis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Medical staffs carrying out the task of collecting NP specimens are in close contact with the suspected patient, thereby posing a high risk of cross-infection. We propose a low-cost miniature robot that can be easily assembled and remotely controlled. The system includes an active end-effector, a passive positioning arm, and a detachable swab gripper with integrated force sensing capability. The cost of the materials for building this robot is 55 USD and the total weight of the …
