Autonomous robot-mediated imitation learning for children with autism

Abstract

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.

Technology-Facilitated Diagnosis and Treatment of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Engineering Perspective

“…Several publications have reported so called closed-loop autonomous systems based on social robots or virtual avatars [135]. Unfortunately, such systems have achieved autonomy only for very specific scenarios.…”

“…Unfortunately, such systems have achieved autonomy only for very specific scenarios. For example, in [135], the system is capable of assessing a very small set of imitation gestures made by a participant in realtime using predefined rules. This is far from the degree of autonomy needed to train children with ASD towards improved practical social skills.…”

“…Zhang et al reported their work on using Kinect to track a participant's gesture and assess the quality of the imitation based a set of predefined rules [135]. Feedback is provided in realtime to the participant.…”

“…In addition to eye gaze, we have seen studies that employ various methods to obtain user feedback for adaptive control of a treatment/education program, including facial expression, head orientation, human gesture tracking, and physiological data collection [135,136,141,143,146,151].…”

Design of Emotional Conversations with a Child for a Role Playing Robot

“…In recent, several attempts has been tried at increasing children's social skills by emotional role-playing game with robots because the robotic system can offer dynamic, adaptive and autonomous interaction for learning of imitation skills with real-time performance evaluation and feedback and can be programmed to respond to child's behavior and provide interesting visual display to encourage a desirable and pro-social behavior from the child [5,6]. Lili verified the applicability of using half or full autonomous robot in improving the social skills learning of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) [5] And Zhi suggested a novel closed-loop autonomous robotic system for imitation skill learning for ASD intervention.…”