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robot was designed, built, tested, and deployed in just eight
weeks, mostly during an intensive quarantine in the city of
Santiago. The three key aspects of this achievement are 1) an
interdisciplinary team composed of neurologists, psychointensivists, engineers, and designers who knew the specific
needs to be filled and had the technical means to fill them;
2) the high commitment of the development team composed of students, most of them members of our IEEE RAS
SBC, who, at the same time, were taking online classes during their fall academic semester; and 3) the use of off-theshelf devices and ROS packages, which allowed for fast
implementation of the robot. Two Pudu robots are in use in
two Chilean hospitals. To regulate their use for providing
mental and emotional health care to patients in ICUs, a specific protocol was created.
The preliminary results show that the use of robots is
effective for providing mental health care to isolated
COVID-19 patients. The patients not only accept receiving
care with use of the robot; they also like it. In addition, the
records of the clinical psychologists using the robots show
that the patients' attention spans have increased to an average
of 45 min. Moreover, patients, clinical psychologists, and
other health-care workers are happy to have the robots working close by because the Pudu robots generate positive emotions in the humans around them.
Acknowledgment
This work was partly funded by ANID PIA grant AFB180004.
References
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Javier Ruiz-del-Solar, Department of Electrical Engineering
and the Chile Advanced Mining Technology Center,
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email:
jruizd@ing.uchile.cl.
Mauricio Salazar, San Juan de Dios Hospital, Santiago,
837-0451, Chile. Email: msalazarcarrillo@gmail.com.
Verónica Vargas-Araya, Clinical Hospital, Universidad de
Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email: vvargasa@hcuch.cl.
Ulises Campodónico, Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email:
campodonico.ulises@gmail.com.
Nicolas Marticorena, Department of Electrical Engineering,
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email:
nicolas.marticorena.vidal@gmail.com.
Giovanni Pais, Department of Electrical Engineering,
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email:
giom.pais@gmail.com.
Rodrigo Salas, Department of Electrical Engineering,
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email:
rodrigosalaso@gmail.com.
Pablo Alfesi, Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad
de Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email: palfessi@gmail.com.
Víctor Contreras, Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email:
vcontrerasroja@ing.uchile.cl.
Javier Urrutia, Department of Electrical Engineering,
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 837-0451, Chile. Email:
javier.urrutia.r@ug.uchile.cl.

MARCH 2021

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https://athome.robocup.org/ http://kobuki.yujinrobot.com/about2/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/ https://www.ros.org/
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2021

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