Swab Sampling Robot: From Diphtheria Swabs to ABB Labs

A swab sampling robot does one of the most ordinary jobs in medicine. It pushes a soft stick into a throat or nose, twists it and seals the sample in a tube. Before 2020 hardly anyone asked for a machine to do that. Then COVID testing put health workers face to face with coughing patients every day. This post looks at how swabs were taken by hand, how drive-through stations sped things up, and the first robots that took swabs themselves in China, Taiwan and Denmark. It ends with where ABB robots already work today: further down the line, in the labs that test those samples.

A COVID-19 testing worker in a booth in Beijing prepares a throat swab, January 2022. Photo: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How throat swabs went from diphtheria wards to drive-through lanes

The throat swab is older than most hospital machines. Edwin Klebs found the diphtheria bacterium in 1883 and Friedrich Loeffler isolated it a year later, so a sample from the throat could now confirm the disease. In early twentieth century England, Kent County Council handed out swab kits to clinics and doctors to track diphtheria: a wire stick tipped with cotton wool, kept in a glass tube. The method barely changed for a hundred years. A nurse or doctor stood in front of the patient, asked them to open wide and swabbed the tonsils and the back wall of the throat. For a nose sample the swab went deep along the floor of the nasal cavity. It takes seconds, and the worker's face is very close to the patient's breath the whole time.

A Kent County Council diphtheria diagnosis outfit with its wire throat swab and glass tube, England, 1901 to 1930. Photo: Science Museum, London / Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

In early 2020 that closeness became the problem. Testing centres burned through masks and gowns, because staff changed protective gear between patients. On 23 February 2020 Lee Jae-myung, then governor of Gyeonggi Province in South Korea, proposed testing people in their cars. Goyang opened the first drive-through station in its city hall car park on 26 February. Registration, a symptom check, the swab and car disinfection took about ten minutes per person, against roughly thirty minutes in a clinic. By April, US military clinics in England were running drive-up stations of their own. A person still held every swab.

A drive-through coronavirus test station in South Korea, 28 February 2020. Photo: Government of South Korea (Gyeongju) via Wikimedia Commons (KOGL Type 1)

To robotics engineers this looked like an obvious job for an arm. In China, a team led by respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan and the Shenyang Institute of Automation started work on 24 January 2020. Their system had a snake-like arm, a binocular endoscope and a remote control station, so a doctor could take the swab from behind a screen. It entered clinical trials on 28 February at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health, and after 80 samples the team reported a first-try success rate above 95 percent. A doctor still steered every movement, which makes it a remote tool. The fully automatic machines came a little later.

A US Air Force nurse shows how swabs are taken at a drive-up testing station at RAF Alconbury, England, April 2020. Photo: Airman 1st Class Jennifer Zima, U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Who builds the swab sampling robot today

In Taiwan, the surgical robot company Brain Navi turned its NaoTrac neurosurgery navigation robot into a nasal swab robot. It scans the face, finds the nostrils and estimates how deep the nasal passage runs, then inserts the swab and twists it. The company showed the machine at Bio Asia Taiwan in 2020 and tested it on 15 people at Hualien Tzu Chi Medical Center. By its own figures a full test took about five minutes. A person needed about fifteen, mostly because of the time spent putting on protective gear first.

Separate swabbing booths at the Palacio de Maynila testing center in Manila, May 2020. Photo: Philippine Information Agency via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In Denmark, ten researchers at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, led by Professor Thiusius Rajeeth Savarimuthu, spent about four weeks in spring 2020 building what they called the world's first fully automatic throat swab robot. It holds the swab in a 3D printed disposable tool and uses a camera to find the right spot in the throat. Afterwards it drops the swab into a glass and screws the lid on. The project became the spin-out Lifeline Robotics, co-founded by Universal Robots co-founder Esben Østergaard, and the robot runs on two UR3 cobot arms.

Nose and throat swabs stored in transport medium tubes for SARS-CoV-2 testing. Photo: Ajay Kumar Chaurasiya / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB has not built a swab robot. Its robots work downstream, where the sealed tube ends up. In July 2026 ABB Robotics and Roche Diagnostics announced a global collaboration on robots for clinical labs, and trade press was still writing about the deal in September. The first applications are pathology slide handling and moving samples between instruments in core labs, with autonomous mobile manipulators and fixed robot arms. ABB has already shown GoFa cobots and a mobile YuMi concept working at lab instruments, as covered in our post on hospital lab automation. In a lab like that, robots could uncap and sort an incoming swab tube and load it into an analyser before any technician touches it.

ABB robot arms working between analysers in a clinical laboratory, shown with the ABB and Roche collaboration. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robotic swabbing and the labs behind it

The next swab robots will probably be built for routine screening more than for pandemic emergencies. Hospitals swab every day for flu, strep throat and resistant bacteria, and the SDU team said from the start that their robot was meant for future viruses as well as COVID. A booth where a patient scans an ID card, opens wide and walks away with a sealed sample can be built with today's technology. Whether patients accept it, and whether it pays for itself, are open questions. A robot that hurts someone once will be remembered, and any arm that touches a face has to pass medical device rules on top of industrial safety standards.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept, a dual arm robot on a wheeled base, in a hospital lab corridor. Photo: ABB

For people at home the path is likely indirect. Self-test kits already let people swab themselves, so most robots will sit behind the scenes in labs that process mailed kits in high volume. Industrial arms fit well there. An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 is built to work next to people and stops when it senses contact. A YuMi IRB 14000 or the single-arm IRB 14050 can handle small tubes and caps. Cells like these are usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio before anyone installs them in a lab. These are possible uses of robots ABB already sells, and ABB has no swab product.

An ABB GoFa cobot with a gripper and camera at a lab bench. Photo: ABB

The harder problems are people and money. Robots that take the swab itself face slow approval, and they will need clinical trials far larger than the 15 to 80 patients the first pilots reported. Lab robots further down the chain have an easier case, since labs already struggle to hire staff, and that shortage is exactly what the ABB and Roche work targets. Either way, someone skilled has to program the cells and keep them clean and running. If you want the needle side of the same story, read our post on robotic blood draws, where the lab chain starts with a different sample.

ABB's mobile YuMi concept loading test tubes into a centrifuge. Photo: ABB

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