Increasingly researchers are attempting to develop robotic technologies for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This pilot study investigated the development and application of a novel robotic system capable of dynamic, adaptive, and autonomous interaction during imitation tasks with embedded real-time performance evaluation and feedback. The system was designed to incorporate both a humanoid robot and a human examiner. We compared child performance within system across these conditions in a sample of preschool children with ASD (n=8) and a control sample of typically developing children (n=8). The system was well-tolerated in the sample, children with ASD exhibited greater attention to the robotic system than the human administrator, and for children with ASD imitation performance appeared superior during the robotic interaction.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) impact 1 in 88 children in the United States. The cost of ASD intervention is tremendous with huge individual and social consequences. In recent years, robotic systems have been introduced with considerable success for ASD intervention because of their potential to engage children with ASD. In this work, we present a novel closed-loop autonomous robotic system for imitation skill learning for ASD intervention. Children with ASD show powerful impairment in imitation, which has been associated with a host of neurodevelopmental and learning challenges over time. The presented robotic system offers dynamic, adaptive and autonomous interaction for learning of imitation skills with real-time performance evaluation and feedback. The system has been tested in a user study with young children with ASD and typically developing (TD) control sample. Further, the performance of the system was compared with that of a human therapist in the user study. The results demonstrate that the developed robotic system is well-tolerated by the target population, engaged the children with ASD more than a human therapist, and produced performances that were relatively better than that of a human therapist.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is characterized by profound impairments in social interaction and communication. Children with ASD have deficits in core areas of social interactions such as gesture imitation. Gesture imitation is one of the early developed social communication skills and is thought to be linked with concurrent as well as later complex social skills such as language development, play and joint attention skills. Thus early identification of such a deficit and providing appropriate intervention regarding gestural imitation skills are quite important. This work, which is a part of a larger study that aims at building a gesture imitation intervention platform for children with ASD, leverages the intrinsic interest of the children with ASD in robotic technology. In this paper, we discuss the part of the robot-mediated intervention system that deals with gesture recognition and present preliminary recognition results.