This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop a social robot designed to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. While robots have previously been trialled for this task, with promising initial results, the systems have tended to be teleoperated, limiting their flexibility and robustness. This project will use epistemic planning techniques as a core component for action selection in the robot system, in order to generate plans that include physical, sensory, and social actions for interacting with humans. The robot will operate in a task environment where appropriate and safe interaction with children, parents/caregivers, and healthcare professionals is required. In addition to addressing the core technical challenge of building an autonomous social robot, the project will incorporate co-design techniques involving all participant groups, and the final robot system will be evaluated in a two-site clinical trial.
The Future of Intelligent Healthcare: A Systematic Analysis and Discussion on the Integration and Impact of Robots Using Large Language Models for Healthcare
A Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism During NAO Robot-Mediated Interaction
Department of Information Technology, School of Engineering, Cochin University of Science and Technology（科钦大学科学与技术学院信息科技系）；Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔学院）
Exploring the Use of Social Robots to Prepare Children for Radiological Procedures: A Focus Group Study
Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano（电子、信息与生物工程系，米兰理工大学）；Pediatric Radiology and Neuroradiology Department, Children’s Hospital V.Buzzi（儿童医院V.Buzzi儿科放射学与神经放射学部）
Perception of Social Robots as Communication Partners in Healthcare for Older Adults
Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics（人机学与机器人研究所）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Department of Robotics（机器人系）；Tohoku University（东北大学）；Institute of Medical Psychology（医学心理学研究所）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；Institute of Psychology（心理学研究所）
The Child Factor in Child-Robot Interaction: Discovering the Impact of Developmental Stage and Individual Characteristics
Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；Örebro University（厄勒布鲁大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Hierarchical Procedural Framework for Low-latency Robot-Assisted Hand-Object Interaction
Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学工程系生物启发机器人实验室）；Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学计算机系）；Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, Zhejiang（宁波工程技术学院）
Edge Computing based Human-Robot Cognitive Fusion: A Medical Case Study in the Autism Spectrum Disorder Therapy
Intelligent Social Systems and Swarm Robotics Lab (IS$^3$R)（智能社会系统与群体机器人实验室）；Computer Science and Information Systems Department（计算机科学与信息系统系）；Bradley University（布拉德利大学）
Syracuse University（雪城大学）；UnityPoint Health（UnityPoint健康）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Binghamton University（宾汉姆顿大学）；Texas Tech University（得克萨斯理工大学）
