This paper reviews the use of socially interactive robots to assist in the therapy of children with autism. The extent to which the robots were successful in helping the children in their social, emotional, and communication deficits was investigated. Child-robot interactions were scrutinized with respect to the different target behaviours that are to be elicited from a child during therapy. These behaviours were thoroughly examined with respect to a child's development needs. Most importantly, experimental data from the surveyed works were extracted and analyzed in terms of the target behaviours and how each robot was used during a therapy session to achieve these behaviours.The study concludes by categorizing the different therapeutic roles that these robots were observed to play, and highlights the important design features that enable them to achieve high levels of effectiveness in autism therapy.

No abstract

The artificial hands for sociable robotics and prosthetics are expected to be touched by other people. Because the skin is the main interface during the contact, a need arises to duplicate humanlike characteristics for artificial skins for safety and social acceptance. Towards the goal of replicating humanlike social touch, this paper compares the skin compliance, conformance and hysteresis of typical robotic and prosthetic skin materials, such as silicone and polyurethane, with the published biomechanical behavior of the human fingertip. The objective was achieved through materials characterization, finite element (FE) modeling and validation experiments. Our initial attempt showed that the selected types of silicone and polyurethane materials did not exhibit the same qualities as the human fingertip skin. However, the methodologies described herein can be used to evaluate other materials, their possible combinations or other fingertip design configurations.