TY - GEN
T1 - ‘Autistic Robots’ for Embodied Emulation of Behaviors Typically Seen in Children with Different Autism Severities
AU - Baraka, K.
AU - Melo, F.S.
AU - Veloso, M.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.The goal of this work is to enable interactions of humans with a humanoid robot that can be customized to exhibit behaviors typically observed in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) along different severities. In a first step, we design robot behaviors as responses to three different stimulus families, inspired by activities used in the context of ASD diagnosis, based on the Autism Diagnosis Observation Schedule (ADOS-2). We implement a total of 16 (possibly blendable) robot behaviors on a NAO humanoid robot according to different autism severities along 4 selected features from the ADOS-2. In a second step, we integrate those behaviors in a customizable autonomous agent with which humans can continuously interact through predefined stimuli. Robot customization is enabled through the specification of a feature vector modeling the behavioral responses of the robot, resulting in 256 unique customizations. Our autonomous architecture enables the robot to automatically detect and respond to parameters of the interaction such as verbal and non-verbal stimuli, as well as sound location. In a third step, we evaluate our designed isolated behaviors in the autonomous system by running a study with three experts. This work paves the way towards potentially novel ways of training ASD therapists, interactive solutions for educating people about different forms of ASD, and novel tasks for ASD therapy with adaptive robots.
AB - © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.The goal of this work is to enable interactions of humans with a humanoid robot that can be customized to exhibit behaviors typically observed in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) along different severities. In a first step, we design robot behaviors as responses to three different stimulus families, inspired by activities used in the context of ASD diagnosis, based on the Autism Diagnosis Observation Schedule (ADOS-2). We implement a total of 16 (possibly blendable) robot behaviors on a NAO humanoid robot according to different autism severities along 4 selected features from the ADOS-2. In a second step, we integrate those behaviors in a customizable autonomous agent with which humans can continuously interact through predefined stimuli. Robot customization is enabled through the specification of a feature vector modeling the behavioral responses of the robot, resulting in 256 unique customizations. Our autonomous architecture enables the robot to automatically detect and respond to parameters of the interaction such as verbal and non-verbal stimuli, as well as sound location. In a third step, we evaluate our designed isolated behaviors in the autonomous system by running a study with three experts. This work paves the way towards potentially novel ways of training ASD therapists, interactive solutions for educating people about different forms of ASD, and novel tasks for ASD therapy with adaptive robots.
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-70022-9_11
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-70022-9_11
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9783319700212
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 105
EP - 114
BT - Social Robotics - 9th International Conference, ICSR 2017, Proceedings
A2 - Suzuki, K.
A2 - He, H.
A2 - Kheddar, A.
A2 - Yoshida, E.
A2 - Eyssel, F.
A2 - Ge, S.S.
A2 - Cabibihan, J.-J.
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 9th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2017
Y2 - 22 November 2017 through 24 November 2017
ER -