Patients in isolation rooms fall into two groups: immunocompromised individuals, who are vulnerable to infections from others, and highly contagious patients, who pose a risk to others. To mitigate these risks, reducing physical interactions is essential. While medical professionals are needed for critical tasks, other routine tasks can be performed by less-skilled workers. This study focuses on designing a social-service healthcare robot that can handle basic tasks, serving as an assistive device rather than a replacement for medical professionals. The goal is to create a self-disinfecting, socially acceptable robot tailored for Lebanese patients in isolation rooms using the Social Robot Co-design Canvasses (SRCC) framework, grounded in human-centered design (HCD) principles. Insights from interviews with patients and medical staff informed the robot’s design, which was subsequently validated through additional interviews with similar groups. The design process considered users’ preferences for appearance, operation, and communication, balancing these with functional and engineering constraints. The article details the robot’s mechanical design, manufacturing, and assembly, providing a template for future development. Results show that the SRCC-based design meets the necessary requirements and, with proposed improvements, would be suitable for broader hospital deployment.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are finding their way into offshore applications. In this work, we postulate an original system that entails a marine locomotive quadrotor UAV that manipulates the velocity of a floating buoy by means of a cable. By leveraging the advantages of UAVs relative to high speed, maneuverability, ease of deployment, and wide field of vision, the proposed UAV−buoy system paves the way in front of a variety of novel applications. The dynamic model that couples the buoy, UAV, cable, and water environment is presented using the Euler-Lagrange method. A stable control system design is proposed to manipulate the forward-surge speed of the buoy under two constraints: maintaining the cable in a taut state, and keeping the buoy in contact with the water surface. Polar coordinates are used in the controller design process to attain correlated effects on the tracking performance, whereby each control channel independently affects one control parameter. This results in improved performance over traditional Cartesian-based velocity controllers, as demonstrated via numerical simulations in wave-free and wavy seas.

The inverted pendulum is by nature a dynamically unstable system and may be subjected to severe disturbances due to its environmental or loading conditions. This paper formulates a design for a nonlinear controller to balance a two-wheeled mobile robot (TWMR) based on Model Reference Adaptive Control. The proposed solution overcomes the limitations of control systems that rely on fixed parameter controllers. Given the nonlinear single-input multi-output (SIMO) nature of the TWMR platform, the proposed adaptive controller can handle non-linearities without the need for linearization, and inherently dealing with SIMO systems. By studying the influence that hidden dynamic effects can cause, we show the preference of the proposed controller over other designs. Simulation results demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of our proposed design, and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in guaranteeing asymptotic output tracking, even in the presence of unknown disturbances.