Remote Control of a Wheeled Robot by Visible Light for Support in Infectious Disease Hospitals

Abstract

The shortage of medical personnel is now a problem and is expected to worsen in the future. Meanwhile, in the case of infectious diseases such as new coronavirus infections, it is very important that nurses and other medical staff treat patients as remotely as possible, which helps to prevent nosocomial infections and is also important for maintaining the medical system. One way to address these issues is to use mobile robots as assistants to automate the transport of patients and supplies. Wireless communication is necessary to control such robots remotely, but doing so with radio waves is undesirable in the medical field because of the impact on patients and medical equipment. Therefore, this paper proposes a teleoperation system for a wheeled mobile robot using visible light with a camera and an array of LEDs, an approach that affects neither patients nor medical equipment. This paper presents the development of visible light communication for this system by introducing a novel blinking pattern for the receiver and novel light-weight algorithm for the transmitter. According to a wide range of experiments, the proposed teleoperation system performs well enough for the remote control of wheeled robots in hospitals.

Development of an Indoor Delivery Mobile Robot for a Multi-Floor Environment

“…This characteristic of DFS contributes to the effectiveness of the proposed 3D route planning method by ensuring that the algorithm systematically and thoroughly explores available paths. The DFS algorithm is implicitly integrated into the entire route planning process, contributing to the systematic exploration of the interconnected multifloor graphs in (5).…”

“…I N recent years, industrial demand for contactless services and automated systems has increased significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic [1]. Concurrently, research is being conducted to apply and expand robot technology in various fields, such as food services, logistics, and hotel business, to replace a decreasing labor population and increase work efficiency [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. In particular, mobile robots are considered an effective solution in the last mile delivery service field [7], [8], with companies like Amazon, Starship, and FedEx actively involved in research and development [9], [10].…”

O2O: An Underwater VLC Approach in Baltic and North Sea

“…where, in above expression (7) the wave number k 0 = 2π/λ, link distance d 0 , magnitude of the spatial frequency κ, and spectrum spectrum model Φ n (κ) are defined, respectively. Additionally, ξ, η, C 0 , C 1 are represented as normalized distance variable, Kolmogorov micro-scale length, and constants with relative strength of temperature and salinity ω, and eddy diffusivity ratio d r .…”

Public Perception and Reception of Robotic Applications in Public Health Emergencies Based on a Questionnaire Survey Conducted during COVID-19

“…The pandemic has placed higher demands on the automation and safety of robots and has promoted the debugging and innovation of related robots in technology. For example, a medical robot arm that can be controlled by Bluetooth from a smartphone [11]; mobile robots using a visible light communication system, which reduces the influence of traditional radio systems on patients and medical equipment [12]; and the indoor positioning system of mobile robot using optical sensors, which greatly improves their accuracy and stability [13]. The situation further increases the possibility of robots being used for emergency response in the event of a public health emergency.…”