  We present an ongoing project that aims to develop a social robot to help
children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical
setting. Our approach uses automated planning as a core component for action
selection in order to generate plans that include physical, sensory, and social
actions for the robot to use when interacting with humans. A key capability of
our system is that the robot's behaviour adapts based on the affective state of
the child patient. The robot must operate in a challenging physical and social
environment where appropriate and safe interaction with children,
parents/caregivers, and healthcare professionals is crucial. In this paper, we
present our system, examine some of the key challenges of the scenario, and
describe how they are addressed by our system.
