Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2010.09909

The Role of Robotics in Infectious Disease Crises

Gregory Hager·Vijay Kumar·Robin Murphy·Daniela Rus·Russell Taylor
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The recent coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the many challenges faced by the healthcare, public safety, and economic systems when confronted with a surge in patients that require intensive treatment and a population that must be quarantined or shelter in place. The most obvious and pressing challenge is taking care of acutely ill patients while managing spread of infection within the care facility, but this is just the tip of the iceberg if we consider what could be done to prepare in advance for future pandemics. Beyond the obvious need for strengthening medical knowledge and preparedness, there is a complementary need to anticipate and address the engineering challenges associated with infectious disease emergencies. Robotic technologies are inherently programmable, and robotic systems have been adapted and deployed, to some extent, in the current crisis for such purposes as transport, logistics, and disinfection. As technical capabilities advance and as the installed base of robotic systems increases in the future, they could play a much more significant role in future crises. This report is the outcome of a virtual workshop co-hosted by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held on July 9-10, 2020. The workshop consisted of over forty participants including representatives from the engineering/robotics community, clinicians, critical care workers, public health and safety experts, and emergency responders. It identifies key challenges faced by healthcare responders and the general population and then identifies robotic/technological responses to these challenges. Then it identifies the key research/knowledge barriers that need to be addressed in developing effective, scalable solutions. Finally, the report ends with the following recommendations on how to implement this strategy.

Explore related subjects

cs.ROcs.CY

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Gregory Hager, Vijay Kumar, Robin Murphy, Daniela Rus, Russell Taylor. 2020-10-19. The Role of Robotics in Infectious Disease Crises. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09909

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Highly-Efficient Differentiable Simulation for Robotics

Robotics simulators have improved significantly in computational speed and scalability, enabling them to generate years of simulated data for complex systems in minutes or hours. Despite these advances, efficiently and accurately computing simulation derivatives remains an open challenge. Addressing this would accelerate the convergence of reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization algorithms, particularly for contact-rich problems. This paper introduces a unifying framework for robotic simulation that accounts for all factors, including dynamics, collisions, and friction. The resulting algorithm computes analytical derivatives of the simulation by implicit differentiation, explicitly handling the intrinsic non-smoothness of the collision and frictional stages while exploiting the sparsity induced by the multi-body structure. Benchmark results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with timings ranging from $5\,μ$s for a 7-dof manipulator to $95\,μ$s for a 36-dof humanoid, an improvement of at least two orders of magnitude over alternative methods. Implemented in C++, the code will be open-sourced after the review process to support applications such as simulation-driven learning and real-time control.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

GeCCo -- a Generalist Contact-Conditioned Policy for Loco-Manipulation Skills on Legged Robots

Most modern approaches to quadruped locomotion focus on using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to learn policies from scratch, in an end-to-end manner. Such methods often fail to scale, as every new problem or application requires time-consuming and iterative reward definition and tuning. We present Generalist Contact-Conditioned Policy (GeCCo) --- a low-level policy trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning that is capable of tracking arbitrary contact points with a quadruped robot. We shift from task-specific end-to-end learning to a modular hierarchy in which a single planner-agnostic, contact-conditioned tracking policy serves as a robust interface between planning and control. By maintaining stable contact execution under dynamic uncertainty and planner mismatch, the policy enables high-level planners (e.g., handcrafted, learned, or optimization-based) to be composed and swapped without retraining. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our method by evaluating on a wide range of locomotion and manipulation tasks in a common framework and under a single generalist policy. These include a variety of gaits, traversing complex terrains (e.g., stairs and slopes) as well as previously unseen stepping-stones and narrow beams, and interacting with objects (e.g., pressing a button, pushing a barrel). Our framework acquires new behaviors more efficiently, simply by combining a task-specific high-level contact planner and the pre-trained generalist policy. Project website: https://vassil-atn.github.io/gecco.github.io

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ERUPT: An Open Toolkit for Interfacing with Robot Motion Planners in Extended Reality

We present the Extended Reality Universal Planning Toolkit (ERUPT), an extended reality (XR) system for interactive motion planning. This paper serves to introduce our open-source system to others who can use it as a base to develop immersive robot interaction applications. Our system allows users to create and dynamically reconfigure environments while they plan robot paths. ERUPT uses XR to provide a broad range of natural interaction capabilities, allowing users to grab and adjust objects in the environment similar to interaction in the real world, rather than using a mouse and keyboard with the scene projected onto a 2D computer screen. Our system integrates with MoveIt, a manipulation planning framework, allowing users to send motion planning requests and visualize the resulting robot paths in virtual or augmented reality. We provide a broad range of interaction modalities, allowing users to modify objects in the environment and interact with a virtual robot. Our system allows operators to visualize robot motions, ensuring desired behavior as it moves throughout the environment, without risk of collisions within a virtual space, and to then deploy planned paths on physical robots in the real world. Code can be found at https://github.com/parasollab/erupt.

cs.RO↗