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Introduction: In Japan, the social climate surrounding older adults has gotten worse as a result of the spread of COVID-19 and the growing isolation of older adults who are increasingly unable to engage in prosocial behavior through work and volunteering. This is detrimental to the physical and mental well-being of older adults. The purpose of this study is to look into robot teleoperation for older adults as a viable way to deal with these issues and overcome the barriers preventing older adults from engaging in prosocial behavior. Materials and methods: We designed and tested a remote-control approach for dialogue agents that is appropriate for older adults as well as evaluating their impressions in a real-world setting. Twelve older adults participated in experiments in two separate locations, a children's center and the city ward office, where they could remotely teleoperate a robot and have conversations with the visitors. In the city ward office, the older adults had a conversation with the visitors and gave them information and trivia quizzes about the city. In the children's center, older adults had conversations with children regarding their age, family, their likes, and dislikes. A questionnaire and interview were set up after the experiments to understand their impressions of the system and to clarify how older adults feel about certain issues regarding remote-controlled work, starting a new job, social interaction, to what extent have older adults been affected by the pandemic, how and in what ways has it affected their involvement in society, and whether teleoperating a robot can be a suitable approach to encourage prosocial behavior from them through volunteer work and social engagement. Results: The results show that older adults have a strong desire to engage in volunteer work, but are hampered mainly by physical isolation resulting from COVID-19 restrictions and their declining physical and mental health. Their impressions of the teleoperation system were highly positive, as they enjoyed having conversations with children through the robot. With this teleoperation system, older adults were able to remote control a robot by themselves without major issues. It made interaction simpler as conversing with children through a robot added a layer of anonymity that allowed older adults to express themselves freely without worrying about how they are perceived by others in public. Discussion: Older adults were able to successfully engage in prosocial behavior through remote-controlling a robot. The system seems to be effective at easing the physical barriers preventing older adults from engaging in volunteer work, which have worsened since the spread of COVID-19. Copyright © 2023 Maalouly, Hirano, Yamazaki, Nishio and Ishiguro.
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a robotic system that supports the remote teaching of technical drawing. The aim of the system is to enable a remote class of paper-based technical drawing, where the students draw the drawing in a classroom, and the teacher gives instructions to the students from a remote place while confirming the paper drawing. The robotic system has a document camera for confirming the paper, a projector, a flat screen to project a cursor on the paper, and a video conference system for communication between the teacher and the students. We conducted two experiments. The first experiment verified the usefulness of a projected cursor. Eight participants evaluated the comprehensibility of the drawing check instruction with or without the projected cursor, and the results suggested that the use of the cursor made the instructions more comprehensible. The second experiment was conducted in a real drawing class. We asked the students in the class to answer a questionnaire to evaluate the robotic system. The result showed that the students had a good impression (useful, easy to use, and fun) of the system. The contribution of our work is twofold. First, it enables a teacher in a remote site to point to a part of the paper to enhance the interaction. Second, the developed system enabled both the students and the teacher to view the paper from their own viewpoints.
ABSTRACT
The use of robotic systems for doctor-patient interaction during Covid-19 and in post-pandemic phases has been proven useful. On the other hand, in current implementations, teleoperating a robot in critical contexts such as the medical scenario may induce a high mental workload on the operator, mainly due to the need to adapt to the remote control of a complex robot, and the reduced environmental awareness. Furthermore, robotic platforms for telemedicine do not usually offer the possibility of establishing physical contact with the patient, which may indeed be useful to show how to assume a certain posture, or to guide a specific movement. The aim of this work is to overcome these limitations, by creating a framework in which the arms, the head, and the base of a humanoid robot can be easily teleoperated with a rapid learning curve and a low mental workload for the operator. The proposed approach is based on the real-time human pose estimation of the operator, which is calculated in real-time and transformed into correspondent skeleton joint angles, used as input to control the upper body joints of the Softbank Robotics robot Pepper. Experiments with users have been performed to check the effectiveness of the imitation system, by verifying the similarity between the human and robot pose and measuring its usability and perceived workload. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Recently, Covid-19 pandemic has introduced some disturbances in the transportation industry. As a result, some university students are now participating in online internship programs. In our laboratory, we proposed an online campus tour project where each foreign student teleoperates with a robot. The robot prepared is outfitted with a camera, laser range finder sensor, and a mobile monitor to represent the student's physical appearance. The robots and foreign students are connected through the university's internal network. During the tour, we found some flaws and improvements in the current system. Because of the time delay and other difficulties, some students are not able to follow the campus tour project at the same pace as the others. Consequently, a distributed module for automated following features with dynamic order is proposed. The following order is determined by the location of each robot. The proposed module combines ROS Navigation Stack and a novel method of robot formation. In this study, the proposed improvement is evaluated and discussed. © 2022 ICROS.
ABSTRACT
This paper introduces a system designed to support conducting experiments of subjects when the situation does not allow experimenter and subject to be in the same place such as the COVID19 pandemic where everyone relied on video conference applications which has its limitation. Due to the difficulty of directing with a video conferencing system using solely video and voice. The system we developed allows an experimenter to actively watch and interact with the subject. Even if you're operating from a distant area, it is still possible to conduct experiments. Another important aspect this study will focus on is the case of when there are several subjects required and the experimenter must be able to guide both subjects equally well. The system proposed uses a 6 DoF robotic arm with a camera and a laser pointer attached to it on the subject side. The experimenter uses a head-mounted display to control it and it moves corresponding to the head movement allowing for easy instruction and intervention to the subject side. Comparison with other similar research is also covered. The study will focus mainly on which viewing method is the easiest for the experimenter to use, and if teaching one subject at the time gives better results than teaching two subjects simultaneously. © 2022 International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO). All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Robot teleoperation is defined as using a remote control to perform tasks requiring on-site operation while the operator is located far from the robot's on-site operable environment. COVID-19, an acute respiratory syndrome, has led to a rapid increase in people's demand for robot teleoperation technology. By applying motion information from the human motion to a slave robot, the current study developed a teleoperation system to realize some medical processes remotely during COVID-19. This system has great potential to advance teleoperation technology during and after the pandemic. Our results show that the motion mapping algorithm possesses more accuracy and stability compared to the traditional kinematic method. © 2022 SPIE. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted collaborative activities, travel, and physical contact, increasing the demand for real-time interactions with remote environments. However, the existing remote communication solutions provide limited interactions and do not convey a high sense of presence within a remote environment. Therefore, we propose a snake-shaped wearable telexistence robot, called Piton, that can be remotely used for a variety of collaborative applications. To the best of our knowledge, Piton is the first snake-shaped wearable telexistence robot. We explain the implementation of Piton, its control architecture, and discuss how Piton can be deployed in a variety of contexts. We implemented three control methods to control Piton: HM-using a head-mounted display (HMD), HH-using an HMD and hand-held tracker, and FM-using an HMD and a foot-mounted tracker. We conducted a user study to investigate the applicability of the proposed control methods for telexistence, focusing on body ownership (Alpha IVBO), mental and physical load (NASA-TLX), motion sickness (VRSQ), and a questionnaire to measure user impressions. The results show that both the HM and HH provide relevantly high levels of body ownership, had high perceived accuracy, and were highly favored, whereas the FM control method yielded the lowest body ownership effect and was least favored. We discuss the results and highlight the advantages and shortcomings of the control methods with respect to various potential application contexts. Based on our design and evaluation of Piton, we extracted a number of insights and future research directions to deepen our investigation and realization of wearable telexistence robots.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Robotics , Wearable Electronic Devices , Humans , PandemicsABSTRACT
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has enforced governments across the world to impose social restrictions on the movement of people and confined them to their homes to avoid the spread of the disease. This not only forbids them from leaving their homes but also greatly reduces their physical activities. This situation has brought attention to virtual technologies such as virtual tours or telepresence robots. While these technologies allow people to remotely participate in activities, it does not address the problem of reduction in physical activities due to the pandemic. In this paper, we propose a telepresence robotic system driven by the user's gait to provide an immersive virtual walking experience in remote locations. To this end, we developed a control interface consisting of an automated treadmill that adjusts its speed to the user's pace automatically. This interface is used to control an avatar robot that sends a 360-degree live image back to the user for visual feedback. We conducted an evaluation experiment to compare the experience using the proposed system in two different conditions to that of regular walking. The results indicated that the proposed system gives an immersive and realistic virtual walking experience while demanding physical effort from the user. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Robots have been used extensively in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic since its outbreak. One prominent direction is the use of robots for swab sampling, which not only solves the shortage of medical staffs, but also prevents them from being infected during face-to-face sampling. However, a massive deployment of sampling robots is still not achievable due to their high costs, safety concerns, deployment complexity, and so on. In this letter, we propose a flexible, safe, and easy-to-deploy swab robot in a compact bench-top system. The robot can perform nasal/throat swab sampling tasks as dexterous as a human manual operation. The bio-mimetic rigid interior and soft exterior design guarantee the sampling robot with both flexibility and safety. Furthermore, the integration of 3-D fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based shape sensor and multi-axis force sensor may enhance the control performance. A dedicated constrained compliance control (CCC) algorithm was developed to tackle the unexpected interactions during sampling, which ensures the validity and safety of the sampling under disturbance. Various experiments are conducted to validate our system and prove its feasibility, flexibility, high safety, and efficiency for both nasal/throat swab sampling tasks. The proposed system is promising to be massive duplicated for robotic swab sampling.
ABSTRACT
We design a central controller system (CCS) and a tele-controlled system (TCS) with an aim of developing the integrated tele-monitoring/operation system that can enable the medical staff to tele-monitor the state of therapeutic devices utilized in the isolation intensive care unit (ICU) and to tele-operate its user interfaces. To achieve this aim, we survey the medical staff for medical requirements first and define the design guideline for tele-monitoring/operation functionality and field applicability. In designing the CCS, we focus on realizing the device having intuitive and user-friendly interfaces so that the medical staff can use the device conveniently without pre-training. Further, we attempt to implement the TCS capable of manipulating various types of user interfaces of the therapeutic device (e.g., touch screen, buttons, and knobs) without failure. As two core components of the TCS, the precision XY-positioner having a maximum positioning error of about 0.695 mm and the end-effector having three-degrees-of-freedom motion (i.e., pressing, gripping, and rotating) are applied to the system. In the experiment conducted for assessing functionality, it is investigated that the time taken to complete the tele-operation after logging into the CCS is less than 1 minute. Furthermore, the result of field demonstration for focus group shows that the proposed system could be applied practically to the medical fields when the functional reliability is improved. IEEE
ABSTRACT
The lasting difficulty imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic has made profound challenges to our daily lives. The prominent task to contend with the COVID-19 is the diagnosis of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The timely diagnosis guides further anti-infection measurements such as effective quarantine and dedicated therapy. Existing diagnosis majorly relies on manual face-to-face Oropharyngeal (OP) and Nasopharyngeal (NP) sampling, which results in high infection risk and heavy working burden to medical staff. Robotic sampling is a promising solution for this challenge because robots are intrinsically immune to viruses and working without fatigue. Following this target, we demonstrate our novel teleoperated OP swab sampling system with excellent safety guarantees, quick deployability, and task efficacy. A bio-inspired soft hand integrated with a soft wrist is developed, which can pick and manipulate the disposable swab as dexterous as a human hand. Stereo imaging is provided to the operator by a terminal binocular camera. The design, working mechanism, and control of our sampling system are discussed. Results show that our proposed robotic sampling system promises safe and effective OP swab sampling to protect medical staff and convenient the sampling process.
ABSTRACT
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 also highlights some new challenges for which robots could be interesting solutions to be deployed in LTC facilities. This requires customization of telecommunication and audio/video/data processing to address specific clinical requirements and needs. This paper presents OpenTera, an open source telehealth framework, aiming to facilitate prototyping of such solutions by software and robotic designers. Designed as a microservice-oriented platform, OpenTera is an end-to-end solution that employs a series of independent modules for tasks such as data and session management, telehealth, daily assistive tasks/actions, together with smart devices and environments, all connected through the framework. After explaining the framework, we illustrate how OpenTera can be used to implement robotic solutions for different applications identified in LTC facilities and homes, and we describe how we plan to validate them through field trials.
ABSTRACT
This article proposes a method to remotely control the robot in the laboratory through the Kinect camera to solve the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic on the laboratory teaching experience which allows users to remotely control robots through their own body movements to understand the principles of robots. It is used to solve the problem of fewer students willing to participate in robot remote education. In this study, the Azure Kinect DK camera was used to collect the motion posture of the upper limbs of the human body. The Kinect camera calculates the frames of human arm joints' motion. The control system calculates the direction of motion of each joint of the human body based on the quaternion by mapping the heterogeneous human joints with the robot joints. Make the posture of the human arm swing correspond to the posture of the robot's movement. Thus, the robot in the laboratory can be driven remotely through Azure Kinect DK. By using the method described in this article, students use the camera's motion capture system to remotely manipulate the robot to grab some simple objects. Through the method described in this research, students can carry out some simple operations on the robots in the laboratory from remote. So it is convenient for students to understand the basic principles of robots and achieve the purpose of better remote experimental teaching. At the same time, students can get practical application of motor servo control, ergonomics, physical simulation engine, digital twin system, etc. © 2022 IEEE.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented extreme pressure on the medical system due to the physical distance policy, especially for procedures such as ultrasound (US) imaging, which are usually carried out in person. Tele-operation systems are a promising way to avoid physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). However, the system usually requires another robot on the remote doctor side to provide haptic feedback, which makes it expensive and complex. To reduce the cost and system complexity, in this paper, we present a low-cost, easy-to-use, dual-mode pHRI-teleHRI control system with a custom-designed hybrid admittance-force controller for US imaging. The proposed system requires only a tracking camera rather than a sophisticated robot on the remote side. An audio feedback is designed for replacing haptic feedback on the remote side, and its sufficiency is experimentally verified. The experimental results indicate that the designed hybrid controller can significantly improve the task performance in both modes. Furthermore, the proposed system enables the user to conduct US imaging while complying with the physical distance policy, and allows them to seamlessly switch modes from one to another in an online manner. The novel system can be easily adapted to other medical applications beyond the pandemic, such as tele-healthcare, palpation, and auscultation.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Robotics , COVID-19/diagnostic imaging , Feedback , Humans , Pandemics , Robotics/methods , UltrasonographyABSTRACT
This paper presents an integrated mapping of motion and visualization scheme based on a Mixed Reality (MR) subspace approach for the intuitive and immersive telemanipulation of robotic arm-hand systems. The effectiveness of different control-feedback methods for the teleoperation system is validated and compared. The robotic arm-hand system consists of a 6 Degrees-of-Freedom (DOF) industrial manipulator and a low-cost 2-finger gripper, which can be manipulated in a natural manner by novice users physically distant from the working site. By incorporating MR technology, the user is fully immersed in a virtual operating space augmented by real-time 3D visual feedback from the robot working site. Imitation-based velocity-centric motion mapping is implemented via the MR subspace to accurately track operator hand movements for robot motion control and enables spatial velocity-based control of the robot Tool Center Point (TCP). The user control space and robot working space are overlaid through the MR subspace, and the local user and a digital twin of the remote robot share the same environment in the MR subspace. The MR-based motion and visualization mapping scheme for telerobotics is compared to conventional 2D Baseline and MR tele-control paradigms over two tabletop object manipulation experiments. A user survey of 24 participants was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance enhancements enabled by the proposed system. The MR-subspace-integrated 3D mapping of motion and visualization scheme reduced the aggregate task completion time by 48% compared to the 2D Baseline module and 29%, compared to the MR SpaceMouse module. The perceived workload decreased by 32% and 22%, compared to the 2D Baseline and MR SpaceMouse approaches.
ABSTRACT
In this article, a mobile robot for item delivery with tele-operation capability is developed and used in the field hospital. The user is able to control the robot and communicate with the patients via an web-App on a cloud server. The robots are deployed and tested on-site in a large size field hospital, while the workload of the robot is studied and planned by using simulation approach. However, the difficulties on actual implementation have arise due to the working condition and risk of infection. These take into account in the development and deployment phases of the system. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spurred drastic changes in the tele-education worldwide, especially Pakistan. Starting from the first phase of pandemic, Pakistani students have witnessed extensive use of tele-school and other e-learning platforms However, e-learning platforms are majorly characterized by audiovisual capability and thus, student learning is limited due to the lack of "experimentation and interaction". To cater this problem, we propose a haptics and teleoperation based inclusive teaching, comprising of a few introductory concepts of physics namely, friction, viscosity, and inertia as pilot cases. The mechanism employs single-master (teacher), multiple-slaves (students) system, each having access to affordable haptic device 'Novint Falcon'. In teaching mode, apart from audio/visual, the demonstrator will explain concepts to students by interacting with force reflecting environments as master, whereas students feel the forces at their own haptic devices. Similarly, in other self-practice mode, students will independently perform experiments by haptic virtual interaction themselves. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Since the COVID-19 Pandemic began, there have been several efforts to create new technology to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic around the world. One of those efforts is to design a new task force, robots, to deal with fundamental goals such as public safety, clinical care, and continuity of work. However, those characteristics need new products based on features that create them more innovatively and creatively. Those products could be designed using the S4 concept (sensing, smart, sustainable, and social features) presented as a concept able to create a new generation of products. This paper presents a low-cost robot, Robocov, designed as a rapid response against the COVID-19 Pandemic at Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, with implemen-tations of artificial intelligence and the S4 concept for the design. Robocov can achieve numerous tasks using the S4 concept that provides flexibility in hardware and software. Thus, Robocov can impact positivity public safety, clinical care, continuity of work, quality of life, laboratory and supply chain automation, and non-hospital care. The mechanical structure and software development allow Robocov to complete support tasks effectively so Robocov can be integrated as a technological tool for achieving the new normality’s required conditions according to government regulations. Besides, the reconfiguration of the robot for moving from one task (robot for disinfecting) to another one (robot for detecting face masks) is an easy endeavor that only one operator could do. Robocov is a teleoperated system that transmits information by cameras and an ultrasonic sensor to the operator. In addition, pre-recorded paths can be executed autonomously. In terms of communication channels, Robocov includes a speaker and microphone. Moreover, a machine learning algorithm for detecting face masks and social distance is incorporated using a pre-trained model for the classification process. One of the most important contributions of this paper is to show how a reconfigurable robot can be designed under the S3 concept and integrate AI methodologies. Besides, it is important that this paper does not show specific details about each subsystem in the robot. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed serious challenges in multiple perspectives of human life. To diagnose COVID-19, oropharyngeal swab (OP SWAB) sampling is generally applied for viral nucleic acid (VNA) specimen collection. However, manual sampling exposes medical staff to a high risk of infection. Robotic sampling is promising to mitigate this risk to the minimum level, but traditional robot suffers from safety, cost, and control complexity issues for wide-scale deployment. In this work, we present soft robotic technology is promising to achieve robotic OP swab sampling with excellent swab manipulability in a confined oral space and works as dexterous as existing manual approach. This is enabled by a novel Tstone soft (TSS) hand, consisting of a soft wrist and a soft gripper, designed from human sampling observation and bio-inspiration. TSS hand is in a compact size, exerts larger workspace, and achieves comparable dexterity compared to human hand. The soft wrist is capable of agile omnidirectional bending with adjustable stiffness. The terminal soft gripper is effective for disposable swab pinch and replacement. The OP sampling force is easy to be maintained in a safe and comfortable range (throat sampling comfortable region) under a hybrid motion and stiffness virtual fixture-based controller. A dedicated 3 DOFs RCM platform is used for TSS hand global positioning. Design, modeling, and control of the TSS hand are discussed in detail with dedicated experimental validations. A sampling test based on human tele-operation is processed on the oral cavity model with excellent success rate. The proposed TOOS robot demonstrates a highly promising solution for tele-operated, safe, cost-effective, and quick deployable COVID-19 OP swab sampling.
ABSTRACT
Since the first reports of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in December 2019, over 33 million people have been infected worldwide and approximately 1 million people worldwide have died from the disease caused by this virus, COVID-19. In the United States alone, there have been approximately 7 million cases and over 200,000 deaths. This outbreak has placed an enormous strain on healthcare systems and workers. Severe cases require hospital care, and 8.5% of patients require mechanical ventilation in an intensive care unit (ICU). One major challenge is the necessity for clinical care personnel to don and doff cumbersome personal protective equipment (PPE) in order to enter an ICU unit to make simple adjustments to ventilator settings. Although future ventilators and other ICU equipment may be controllable remotely through computer networks, the enormous installed base of existing ventilators do not have this capability. This paper reports the development of a simple, low cost telerobotic system that permits adjustment of ventilator settings from outside the ICU. The system consists of a small Cartesian robot capable of operating a ventilator touch screen with camera vision control via a wirelessly connected tablet master device located outside the room. Engineering system tests demonstrated that the open-loop mechanical repeatability of the device was 7.5 mm, and that the average positioning error of the robotic finger under visual servoing control was 5.94 mm. Successful usability tests in a simulated ICU environment were carried out and are reported. In addition to enabling a significant reduction in PPE consumption, the prototype system has been shown in a preliminary evaluation to significantly reduce the total time required for a respiratory therapist to perform typical setting adjustments on a commercial ventilator, including donning and doffing PPE, from 271 to 109 s.