???The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com???. Copyright Springer.Increasingly socially intelligent agents (software or robotic) are used in education, rehabilitation and therapy. This paper discusses the role of inter-active, mobile robots as social mediators in the particular domain of autism therapy. This research is part of the project AURORA that studies how mobile robots can be used to teach children with autism basic interaction skills that are important in social interactions among humans. Results from a particular series of trials involving pairs of two children and a mobile robot are described. The results show that the scenario with pairs of children and a robot creates a very interesting social context which gives rise to a variety of different social and non-social interaction patterns, demonstrating the specific problems but also abilities of children with autism in social interactions. Future work will include a closer analysis of interactional structure in human-human and robot-human interaction. We outline a particular framework that we are investigating

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Abstract. This chapter outlines the application of interactional structures observed by various researchers to the development of artificial interactive agents. The original work from which these structures are drawn has been carried out by researchers in a range of fields including anthropology, sociology and social psychology: the 'local approach' described in this paper draws particularly on conversation analysis. We briefly discuss the application of heuristics derived from this work to the development of an interaction tracking system and, in more detail, discuss the use of this work in the development of an architecture for generating action for an interactive agent.

This chapter discusses two analysis techniques that are being used in order to study how children with autism interact with an autonomous, mobile and 'social' robot in a social setting that also involves adults. A quantitative technique based on micro-behaviours is outlined. The second technique, Conversation Analysis, provides a qualitative and more detailed investigation of the sequential order, local context and social situatedness of interaction and communication competencies of children with autism. Preliminary results indicate the facilitating role of the robot and its potential to be used in autism therapy.