Service robots in hospitals to reduce spreading of COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 is an infectious disease that is introduced by a new coronavirus. The COVID-19 virus symptoms can include coughing, fatigue, fever for those with mild cases. For more severe cases, it can lead to shortness of breath, chest pain, and eventually death. Due to its infectious nature, people started taking health precautions that were advised by the World Health Organization such as social distancing, washing hands, and sanitizing surfaces. Due to this pandemic, the aim of this project is to automate mundane tasks with the help of a service robot to reduce physical contact as well as reduce the workload on healthcare workers. Tasks such as delivering food, medication, water, and other necessities to patients with infectious diseases. In addition, this project specifically reduces physical contact between patients and the attending nurse. A service robot is a robot that is built to perform a repetitive or dangerous task in order to assist humans. A service robot executes repetitive tasks more efficiently compared to a person who is prone to lose focus and make mistakes during work hours. The service robot performs tasks that are requested by the patients and accepted by the nurse through the mobile application. The application shows both the nurse and the patients the position of the robot and the task it is performing. The project's design was based on a small robot car that receives a path from the server upon a request using a mobile app. On top of that, the project includes a functional mobile application, a RESTful API, a no-SQL database, and a python microservice that is responsible for path planning. The path planning algorithm used is the A* algorithm for finding the shortest path to the destination. The service robot avoids obstacles by first stopping after detecting the obstacle, label the coordinates of that location as obstacle, rotates 180 degrees, moves to the previous location, and then requests the path again. The constant communication between the robot and the server allows the server to track the robot's movement.