World's first full-process simulation nasopharyngeal swab sampling robot on board

“Pengcheng Qingceng” II - the world's first fully automated nasopharyngeal swab sampling robot was unveiled in Shenzhen Luohu Hospital Group's yellow code area in June. This high-performance mobile collaborative robot product is led by Shenzhen Luohu Hospital Group (Luomedicine), with the cooperation of Shenzhen InkShadow Technology Co. R & D team by Luo Medical Dr. Sun Xizhuo as the general director, Dr. Qin Jinzhou for the medical demonstration of the general executive, ink shadow Dr. Yang Yiming is responsible for robotics and core hardware automation integration, AIRS Dr. Timothy Zhang is responsible for the core algorithms.

According to InkShadow Technology, “Pengcheng Qingceng” second generation robot is the world's first fully automated nasopharyngeal swab sampling robot, the main body of the mobile collaborative robots, compared to last year's launch of a fixed base of the single-arm robot “Pengcheng Qingceng” first generation of machines, it has the upper half of a humanoid robot, it has the upper half of a humanoid robot. Compared with the single-armed robot “Pengcheng Qingceng” launched last year, it has the upper body (head and arms) of a humanoid robot, a free omni-directional moving vehicle (AGV) and a tablet computer with integrated code scanning, voice and video interaction. The vehicle body has built-in sampling tubes, swabs, sterile sample reserve devices, disinfection and sterilization devices and other consumables.

In terms of working principle, the robot utilizes advanced laser SLAM technology to pre-store environmental maps and moves to any user-specified sampling location through online path planning technology. Before sampling begins, the robot's arms work together to open and close the cap of the sampling tube and sweep the code, and grab and calibrate the nasopharyngeal swab. After the user is in place, the identity information such as health code is scanned through the tablet interactive interface, and the robot automatically binds and uploads the sampling tube and identity information to the public health inspection platform. Then, the robot uses 3D vision and six-dimensional force control technology, safe, accurate and fast sampling of nucleic acid on the user's nasopharyngeal swabs, after which it automatically cut the swabs and for sampling tubes, gripper claws, body and other key components to eliminate, and then move to the next sampling point to continue the sampling task.

InkShadow Technology also said, “Pengcheng Qingceng” second generation machine in the predecessor based on the development of more accurate and stable 3D vision algorithms, optimize the algorithmic model of face recognition, real-time head posture estimation and precise positioning algorithms of facial features, the body of the machine adopts the depth of multiple views of the depth sensor, able to obtain multi-angle images and color point cloud, and feature extraction, tracking and 3D spatial localization algorithms were developed for swabbing images and point clouds, and human targets, respectively. During the movement of the robotic arm, the robot was able to mimic the sampling action of a senior nurse for sampling.

Under the guidance of medical ethics approval, the sampling robot carries out prototype testing, and as of June 14. 2022. it has completed 634 pre-clinical volunteer tests: the success rate of one-time sampling reaches 85%, and the success rate of the second time is more than 92%; 82% of the robotic collection of subjects feel similar to or better than the feeling of manual collection; there is no serious adverse reaction, and the other minor or general adverse reactions are similar to those of Artificial sampling; machine sampling feeling comprehensive score of 6.7 points, artificial sampling feeling comprehensive score of 5.8 points, the overall feeling of machine sampling is better than artificial sampling (comfort score of 9 points, general and not much difference in the score of 6 points, uncomfortable and more difficult than the artificial score of 4 points, very uncomfortable score of 2 points). Robotic sampling comfort is significantly higher than manually operated nasal swab sampling, robotic collection of the amount of samples obtained by the testing center to verify that the effect of manual collection with senior medical personnel similar (internal standard gene Ct value statistically non-significant difference), to achieve high-precision testing standards.