Service Robots in Wuhan Cabin Hospitals

Abstract

The cabin hospitals used for COVID-19 victims have an infectious environment and thus require highly autonomous systems to provide various services.This article presents a multi robot architecture designed for cabin hospitals with special focus on the sensors used by service robots.The robots’ functions include autonomous disinfection, delivery, cleaning, temperature measurement, physical interaction, and conversation assistance. The robots collaborate with each other by using multiple sensors in large and complicated scenes and evolve together. The robots are controlled by cloud controllers considering a human-centered multi-robot collaboration mechanism.This article presents the details of these robots, including the hardware and software architecture of the robots with sensors, the communication modules, and the cloudbased central controllers. It also presents several applications of the robots and discusses open problems.