RoboParrot: A robotic platform for human robot interaction, case of autistic children

Abstract

This paper presents a robotic platform suitable for Human-Robot Interactions (HRI), with focus on verbal interactions. It is obvious that interactive and social skills are two indispensable requirements in many application areas where robots and humans need to interact with each other. Consequently, we have developed a cognitive robot companion, i.e. a parrot like robot, with main focus on verbal interaction with humans. A possible educational or therapeutic aspects of this robot for children who suffer from Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been considered. In other words the robot is designed intended to comfort and emotionally interact with autistic children. Different types of functionalities are introduced and discussed in the light of their potential investigation in humanrobot experiments. The platform is intended for research in otherHRI applications, such as concept learning and robotainment. The initial results show the attractiveness of the designed robot for humans and its great potential for success in using this platform for rehabilitation in social interaction, edutainment and entertainment.

Teaching Music to Children with Autism: A Social Robotics Challenge

“…trying to improve eye contact, social and cognitive skills of children with ASD, etc.) is increasing [19][20][21][22].…”

“…trying to improve eye contact, social and cognitive skills of children with ASD, etc.) is increasing [19][20][21][22].This paper intends to combine the potentials of music education/therapy and robotic technology in autism research. To the best of our knowledge, utilizing a humanoid robot to systematically teach music to children with autism has not received wide attention [19,[23][24][25].…”

Conversational Agents in Therapeutic Interventions for Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Survey

“…Three of the surveyed papers sought to understand how children with autism behave with the conversational agents to promote social and communication skills. Soleiman et al [77] employed a parrot-shaped robot called RoboParrot that interacted both with typically-developed children and children with ASD to stimulate to socially interact with the agent during unstructured sessions. Both groups showed interest in the robot, but the autistic children hesitated to approach it and needed to be encouraged by their parents.…”

“…Desideri et al [24] wanted to clarify in which role (e.g., reinforcer vs. mediator) a conversational agent could be more effective in improving the intervention. Also, a deeper understanding is needed among preferences of neurotypical people and people with NDD toward different additional input and output interaction modalities and their combinations [9,15,77]. Specific to output interaction modes, Axelsson et al [9] stressed the need to improve the expression skills of conversational agents (e.g., through the face) since this might improve the user experience at large.…”

“…Improving automatic speech recognition modules would enable more self-ruling conversational agents, which would reduce the human task load. For this reason, future work should pursue improving certain technical drawbacks, especially regarding speech recognition problems, also considering more severe cases of speech impairments [3,27,74,77,81]. As a possible research direction, Smith et al [74] suggested implementing a voice profile option, which allows the speech recognition model to adapt to individual voices.…”