Abstract: Over the past 20 years, a variety of fatal infectious diseases have ravaged the world one after another, and caused great harm to both the life safety of the people and the economic development of all countries in the world. Nursing robots have played a critical role against these pandemics. A survey of the research and application of nursing robot in the pandemics around the world was presented in this paper. Important research focuses and key technologies for the next generation of nursing robots were proposed in the infectious ward, especially in the human-like motion control of the robot actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles, the motion mapping algorithms for intuitive teleoperation, the human-like tactile sensing and force control of the slave robot, and the imitation learning of the nursing skills.