Reconfiguring and ramping-up ventilator production in the face of COVID-19: Can robots help?

194

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.

Section: Discussion and Identification Of Future Research Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Robots In Covid-19mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wang

2021

194

“…The digital platform can optimize supplier channels and improve the timeliness and accuracy of supply chain data to provide an accurate data basis for decision-making when a crisis comes. On the other hand, manufacturing companies should pay more attention to promoting the application of flexible automated production lines and smart factories to promote automation and flexible production, reduce dependence on labor, and better respond to labor fluctuations [ 18 ]. Manufacturing companies should have the ability to produce a variety of products to increase the company's production line utilization.…”

Section: The Impact Of Covid-19 On Manufacturingmentioning

confidence: 99%

New IT driven rapid manufacturing for emergency response

Tao

Cheng

et al. 2021

COVID-19, which is rampant around the world, has seriously disrupted people's normal work and living. To respond to public urgent needs such as COVID-19, emergency supplies are essential. However, due to the special requirements of supplies, when an emergency occurs, the supply reserve mostly cannot cope with the high demand. Given the importance of emergency supplies in public emergencies, rapid response manufacturing of emergency supplies is a necessity. The faster emergency supplies and facilities are manufactured, the more likely the pandemic can be controlled and the more human lives are saved. Besides, new generation information technology represented by cloud computing, IoT, big data, AI, etc. is rapidly developing and can be widely used to address such situations. Therefore, rapid response manufacturing enabled by New IT is presented to quickly meet emergency demands. And some policy suggestions are presented.

“…Due to the limitation of robot’s ability, the complex and flexible operations in assembly tasks still need to be done by human. So the HRC assembly in a shared environment is an appropriate way to realize safe and efficient assembly under the epidemic [ 3 ]. Meanwhile, the 3D printing integration [ 4 ] in HRC assembly system can make the components completely mapped from their digital models, which promotes the formation of industrial automation and intelligent factory.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A digital twin-driven human-robot collaborative assembly approach in the wake of COVID-19

Zhang

Sun

et al. 2021

In the wake of COVID-19, the production demand of medical equipment is increasing rapidly. This type of products is mainly assembled by hand or fixed program with complex and flexible structure. However, the low efficiency and adaptability in current assembly mode are unable to meet the assembly requirements. So in this paper, a new framework of human-robot collaborative (HRC) assembly based on digital twin (DT) is proposed. The data management system of proposed framework integrates all kinds of data from digital twin spaces. In order to obtain the HRC strategy and action sequence in dynamic environment, the double deep deterministic policy gradient (D-DDPG) is applied as optimization model in DT. During assembly, the performance model is adopted to evaluate the quality of resilience assembly. The proposed framework is finally validated by an alternator assembly case, which proves that DT-based HRC assembly has a significant effect on improving assembly efficiency and safety.