Humanoid robotics in health care: An exploration of children’s and parents’ emotional reactions

A new non-pharmacological method of distraction was tested with 57 children during their annual flu vaccination. Given children’s growing enthusiasm for technological devices, a humanoid robot was programmed to interact with them while a nurse administered the vaccination. Children smiled more often with the robot, as compared to the control condition, but they did not cry less. Parents indicated that their children held stronger memories for the robot than for the needle, wanted the robot in the future, and felt empowered to cope. We conclude that children and their parents respond positively to a humanoid robot at the bedside.

Supervisory control of multiworkcell manufacturing systems with shared resources

Flexible-manufacturing systems (FMSs) may comprise a number of workcells where production resources are shared among the workcells for a variety of practical reasons. Although the utilization of independent workcells with sharing resources improves the flexibility of FMSs, avoiding deadlocks is essential for their successful implementation. This paper introduces a novel methodology for the synthesis of a set of conflict- and deadlock-free supervisors to individually control every workcell within a FMS inter-related by common (shared) resources. The proposed methodology is based on Extended Moore Automata (EMA) and Controlled-Automata theories. A new algorithmic procedure to analyze the concurrent operation of supervisors is also introduced in order to check for the existence or absence of deadlock states.