Claims:1) Interaction and serviceable robot invented to deliver the food and essential needs especially for the emergency usage in the covid ward having automated retractable shelf and drawer using actuators
2) A drawer to store all the waste and unnecessary stuff with reference to Claim.
A second drawer to store other essential needs like medical equipment, gloves, sanitizers, masks. with reference to Claim.
3) Built-in sensors in covid-bot for measuring the human body data like oxygen concentration, heart rate, body temperature. A contactless pulse oximeter sensor is used to retrieve the pulse, oxygen concentration and heartbeat of the patient
4) Floor cleaning mechanism in the Covid-bot using a sweeping mechanism.
5) Robot with a purpose to carry the oxygen cylinders in a separate container provided.
6) Object detection & Obstacle Avoidance is also installed in the robot to avoid unnecessary objects and obstacles.
7) Two compartments for storing water and other essential things.
8) The bot has a steering system which propagates the movement of the bot using four rubber wheels and balanced payload sustained using a suspension system.
9) The covid bot uses a mobile or a smart phone which helps the patients with interaction with their loved ones and also to have interaction with the doctor remotely with reference to claim. The smartphone also can be used for taking footages of the patients and also retrieving information of the patients via a QR code scanner app inbuilt within the app with reference to Claim
, Description:Covid interaction & Service robot for covid ward

Field

[0002] This invention relates to the automation of a robot during its interaction with people and itself.

Introduction

[0003] During this pandemic the interaction between people has fully stopped especially with those who are a carrier of this covid-19 virus and our nation’s frontline heroes are tirelessly working in open atmosphere exposed to the virus including the doctor who are specialist in handling themselves and patients admitted but with the work they have a huge risk in interacting between numerous people who are a carrier in a single room with doctors covering their body with various mask and coats. With no proper air to breathe for over 10-12hrs and with different variant of virus there is more risk of spreading it. Our motive to improve the automation sector and help these frontline heroes have come true by this invention of interaction robot with the sole purpose of robot to serve the work done by doctors in a safe manner so that the doctors are healthy and immune from risk of getting infected by the virus. The robot is fully automated with several sensors and current technology making it a promising and reliable robot to serve in emergency situations.

[0004] We have witnessed many great things in automation especially in robots with their response and performance and it's still being advanced in many ways over the years, using those as reference we at digitran solution have come up with this idea to automate our robot with the best technology available now. The covid-bot has efficient features and sensors in it to make it the best one for the usage and be safe.

SUMMARY

[0005] With reference to the above introduction, the object of the present invention is to help with the disclosed situation. The covid-bot has a structural design of a shape of trapezoid for its body of size of 4.5*3ft of aluminum material.

[0006] It has attached wheel acting as legs which will be a line following mechanism robot with the help of image detection using arduino/raspberry pi boards.

[0007] The head part of the covid-bot uses a CMOS sensor OV7670 camera module for image processing, object detection, color detection with other features like saturation adjustment and the head is being supported by the rod acting as support to the neck.

[0008] The features that the covid-bot have, making it the safe and self-sufficient robot are.

[0009] The compartments are made available to carry all essentials that are required in an emergency ward like masks, sanitizer, food, water, and other instruments like personal oximeter.

[0010] It is fully automated which means it requires no guidance or expertise to control.

[0011] It doesn’t just keep people and itself sanitized from surrounding it even sanitizes the surrounding (floor) of the ward with the help of sweeping and spraying mechanism provided at the floor of the covid-bot.

[0012] Along with the sensors that are being used for the covid-bot it also has the sensors that are useful in reading some essential data to monitor the health of the patient or user like the oxygen concentration and body temperature.

[0013] Along with the image processing used for movement of covid-bot it is also used in maintaining the data of the patient using databases and image processing and it is also enabled with the object detection and obstacle avoidance.

[0014] A special feature that the covid-bot has is an oxycan bottle which is a 99%pure oxygen in a bottle-can and can be used by patient under critical condition until they are attended by doctor, the oxycan is a simple spraying mechanism.

[0015] The covid-bot is a combination of electrical parts and mechanical features along with some computer programming for automation which enables the covid-bot to effectively function and interact with the patient properly.

[0016] The mechanical features involved in making of the covid-bot are the drawing mechanism, steering mechanism.

[0017] The drawing mechanism is used in the covid-bot so that the drawer carrying essential needs is drawn out from the compartment so that the user can easily pick and use the needs. This mechanism involves a simple drawing mechanism which is used in table drawers and using linear actuators these are made automated, along with the drawers there is a shelf which can move up by 60-deg towards outside of the covid-bot body which is performed using the rotary actuators.

[0018] The whole compartment is enclosed in the body of covid-bot which has a sliding door mechanism operated by linear actuators using which we can get the access to needs inside the covid-bot. Every drawer and shelf have a rubber mat to hold the object inside them firmly.

[0019] The steering mechanism used in covid-bot is a line following mechanism which is possible due to various motors and acrylic sheet for following the path, the 4 wheels attached to the covid-bot are rubber wheels which are operated by 2 DC motor driven by motor driver to make this as automation we also need sensor and programming.

[0020] The sensors used in the process are IR sensor and ultrasonic sensor and programmed using various languages like python and C language. These mechanisms involve the movement of the body which requires some power/energy which is calculated using the power required formula due to the friction between the wheels or rolling friction force.

[0021] The power Required formula is given by

Where;
Pmc -Power Required
Fc -Friction
v -Robot Speed
m -Mass of Robot
g - Gravity
fms - Coefficient of Rolling Friction
k - Factor of Safety

[0022] The values of coefficient of friction and factor of safety are pre-defined based on the material and requirements where coefficient of friction(fms) is 0.4 and factor of safety(k) is selected as 2. Where the mass of robot (m) is assumed to be 30kg and speed of robot (v) to be 0.80m/s. By substituting all the values in the power produced formula we get the Pms to be 188.16W.

[0023] Once we get the value of Pms we can find the actual power Pa which is given by

Where;
Pa -Actual Power
Pms -Power Produced
-Overall Efficiency

[0024] The value of the Power Required Pms is already known by above calculations and the value of overall efficiency is to be taken as 0.99 due to direct drive, after substituting the value of power and the overall efficiency we get the actual power to be 190.06W.

[0025] After we find the value of actual power required we can find the value of torque T produced which is given by

Where;
T -Torque
Fa -Force
r -Radius Of Wheel
w -Weight Of Body (including gravity (g))
sin(𝛉) -Sine Of Angle Theta
𝛉 -Angle Of Elevation

[0026] The value of angle of elevation(𝛉) is taken about 30 degrees whereas the diameter of the wheel used the covid-bot is 220cm therefore the radius(r) is to be 0.11m, the weight(w) of the covid-bot is taken along the gravity which will be 294kg, after substituting the value of radius, weight and angle of elevation we get the torque(T) required which is 16.17 N/m.

[0027] The covid-bot has a suspension system in it which is a torsion bar suspension also known as torsion spring system

[0028] The electrical components and its feature in covid-bot are the sensors and its working with the help of other microcontrollers and actuators.

[0029]The sound sensor which is used to recognize the sound and make sure it replies accordingly, there is a minimal change in voltage for which we use op amplifiers (op amp) to get measurable voltage change.

[0030] The proximity sensor or ultrasonic sensor which generates high frequency sound waves and suggest the object disturbance which is known as obstacle avoidance and using this sensor we can also measure distance along the path.

[0031] The CMOS sensor which is used for image processing, object detection, color detection, and various operations can be performed which can be possible by CMOS sensor, this sensor has a range of withstanding temperature of 40 to 115 deg C(celcius).

[0032]The navigation sensor which is used by bluetooth via Wi-Fi to know the location of covid-bot within a building known as Wi-Fi positioning system.

[0033] The IMU sensor which is used to get the feedback like to measure velocity, gravitational forces, acceleration, there are few IMU sensors which have combined GPS providing positional feedback.

[0034]The voltage sensor which will be a simple operational amplifier (op amp) as in sound sensor which accepts the low voltage value and amplifies into the measurable voltage value.

[0035] The heart rate sensor or pulse oximeter sensor which is a highly integrated small sized sensor and non-chest based detection technology which is ultra-low power consumption for maintaining data of the user and a contactless sensor which uses IR rays to get the details like heartbeat, pulse and oxygen saturation of the patient.

[0036] The IR thermal sensor is used in the covid bot above the head part to measure the temperature of the patient contactless.

[0037] The L298N motor driver which is a high power motor driver perfect for driving dc motor and stepper motor.

[0038] The battery pack used to supply the power to covid-bot is present at the bottom of the body which is lithium ion battery pack of 12 volts in a 3 parallel combination of 6 batteries in each giving a nominal voltage of 216V, the batteries are rechargeable but has to be removed and charged separately meanwhile the covid-bot can still perform all work using the second battery pack while the first one is still charging, the covid-bot has a working life of 7-8 hours every time the batteries are changed.

[0039] The electrical connection of all sensors and the mechanism in covid-bot are connected by the microcontroller, raspberry pi, arduino, and arduino nano boards.

[0040] Another unique feature of the covid-bot is the interaction system as stated in the name covid interaction & service robot. The interaction is taken place using a mobile, a smartphone which have applications to interact between the patient and doctor and also between the family members of patient and also to store the data of patient’s health along with the photo and other information of patient using the database of the application, QR code scanner and facial recognition.

[0041]The programming part of the covid-bot to make it automated is done using various programming languages like python and C. The bot is programmed with object detection and obstacle avoidance which detects any object as an obstacle and avoids it. The technologies used would be OpenCV and Yolo using ImageNet. It is a challenging computer vision task that requires both successful object localization in order to locate and draw a bounding box around each object in an image, and object classification to predict the correct class of the object that was localized.

[0042] The Raspberry Pi microcontroller can be effectively used for the image processing and therefore a serial communication is enabled between the Raspberry Pi module and the Arduino UNO.

[0043]Each device on top of doing well what it’s supposed to do must be able to clearly communicate with other devices. That’s one of the most important things to work on in order to switch from a very basic application to more complex ones.

[0044] Here in order for both the microcontrollers to effectively communicate with each other and transfer data via serial communication. UART protocol which abbreviates to “Universal Asynchronous Reception and Transmission”. Basically it’s an asynchronous multi-master protocol based on the Serial communication, which will allow to communication between the 2 boards. Be reassured, there are libraries that will handle all the low layers.

[0045] Multi-master means that all connected devices will be free to send data when they want. This is one of the main differences with master-slaves protocols, where only the master device can initiate a communication. Usually the other protocols such as I2C and SPI that can be needed as master-slaves configurations: for example when one Arduino board and multiple sensors or actuators are used.

[0046] The Arduino UNO board has one UART that can be used either with a USB cable or from the RX/TX. Some boards have more available UARTs. For example the Arduino Mega has different Serials (Serial, Serial1, Serial2, Serial3) and the Arduino Zero has a native USB port only (use Serial USB instead of Serial).

[0047] On the Raspberry Pi, it is possible to connect to as many Serial devices on the USB ports. Each will have a different device name. GPIOs (RX0/TX0) for an additional UART also can be used.

[0048] By using the Arduino Serial library, which allows users to log on to what’s happening in the code and get user input. When the Serial monitor is used, well, basically the Arduino IDE initiates a Serial communication with the Arduino.

[0049] For Serial communication a serial USB can be used between both the boards. On the Raspberry Pi side, a simple USB connector is all that is needed. Any of the 4 USB ports available on the board can be used.

[0050] For Arduino, the USB port that can be used to upload code from the computer (with the Arduino IDE) to the board. Here the USB connector will depend on which version is used. For boards like Arduino UNO and Mega, the connector will be different from Arduino Nano.

[0051] The Raspberry Pi is great for having a lot of computation power embedded in the application. That can run complete software in many languages, web servers, robotics applications, etc. The Raspberry Pi certainly has some GPIOs which can be used, but they are not as good as the Arduino ones. The Arduino is more appropriate to directly handle hardware sensors and actuators such as IMU, servo motors, stepper motors, anything which requires more power, etc.

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Material description-
Dc motor - 2
Motor driver - 1
IR sensor - 3
Ultrasonic sensor - 2
Rotary actuators - 4
Linear actuators - 4
Pulse Oximeter sensor - 1
Sound sensor - 2
Voltage sensor - 1
IMU sensor - 1
CMOS sensor - 2
Positioning system - 1
Raspberry PI boards – 1
Arduino board – 1
Arduino Nano board - 1
Rubber wheel - 4
Smartphone – 1
Aluminium sheet
Acrylic sheet
Sensor casings

Reference number used in figure-
1 :- Head
2 :- Smartphone
3 :- IR thermal sensor
4 :- Bottle holder
5 :- Neck Extension
6 :- Oxygen Cylinder Container
7 :- Body
8 :- Sliding Door
9 :- Wheels
10:- Sliding Mechanism
11:- Top Drawer
12:- Actuated Table
13:- Bottom Drawer
14:- Link
15:- Oxygen can container
16:- Oxygen cylinder can
17:- Pulse oximeter sensor with Casing
18:- Ultrasonic Sensor with Casing