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

As the COVID-19 pandemic expands, the shortening of medical equipment is swelling. A key piece of equipment getting far-out attention has been ventilators. The difference between supply and demand is substantial to be handled with normal production techniques, especially under social distancing measures in place. The study explores the rationale of human-robot teams to ramp up production using advantages of both the ease of integration and maintaining social distancing. The paper presents a model for faster integration of collaborative robots and design guidelines for workstations. The scenario is evaluated for an open source ventilator through continuous human-robot simulation and amplification of results in a discrete event simulation.