A literature survey of the robotic technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Since the late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has been spread all around the world. The pandemic is a critical challenge to the health and safety of the general public, the medical staff and the medical systems worldwide. It has been globally proposed to utilise robots during the pandemic, to improve the treatment of patients and leverage the load of the medical system. However, there is still a lack of detailed and systematic review of the robotic research for the pandemic, from the technologies’ perspective. Thus a thorough literature survey is conducted in this research and more than 280 publications have been reviewed, with the focus on robotics during the pandemic. The main contribution of this literature survey is to answer two research questions, i.e. 1) what the main research contributions are to combat the pandemic from the robotic technologies’ perspective, and 2) what the promising supporting technologies are needed during and after the pandemic to help and guide future robotics research. The current achievements of robotic technologies are reviewed and discussed in different categories, followed by the identification of the representative work’s technology readiness level. The future research trends and essential technologies are then highlighted, including artificial intelligence, 5 G, big data, wireless sensor network, and human-robot collaboration.

The Effect of Perceptions on Service Robot Usage Intention: A Survey Study in the Service Sector

“…This significance became apparent following the COVID-19 outbreak, which not only demonstrates the existing employment of robots in everyday tasks but also reveals the possibility for robots to be used in a variety of other fields, including distribution, entertainment, cleaning, guidance, and security [7]. Especially after the epidemic, the hospitality industry can use robots in different scenarios that can help reduce infection, such as preparing food, creating "safe" distanced spaces [8], disinfection, monitoring, distribution [9].…”

Smart Cleaner: A New Autonomous Indoor Disinfection Robot for Combating the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…During the past year, various robots have been employed to conduct a series of key tasks and vital functions via different methods [2]. Robots have been classified in the literature as one of the ways of overcoming the challenges of the pandemic [3][4][5]. It has been found that, overall, robotic systems are overall apt solutions for dealing with many problems caused by COVID-19.…”

Design of a Reconfigurable Wall Disinfection Robot

“…Hence, the challenges of manual disinfection methodologies have to be readdressed and reconsidered. Automating this process with robots can reduce disease transmission between healthcare workers and also provide better hygiene in their environments [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. To effectively disinfect potentially contaminated areas, robots can serve to contribute towards an efficacious containment of the infectious disease.…”

“…Most of the literature discusses automation methods by using robots equipped with sprayers or, mostly, UV lamps [ 16 , 18 , 21 ]. The exploitation of UV technologies as a method for surface disinfection was highly efficient (up to 99.99 percent).…”

“…Furthermore, a wall cleaning robot should have the ability to work in an unknown environment. In this regard, online-decision making ability is preferred over offline planners [ 16 , 33 ]. Therefore, the wall-following method for a wall cleaning robot should have online decision-making ability.…”