Robotic Social Environments: A Promising Platform for Autism Therapy

Observational learning, especially in social environments, is considered an important part of the learning process in a human development. Unfortunately, children with autism lack this learning ability, especially in human social environments due to their deficiency in social interaction. Consequently, in this paper we present a pilot study in which we show that children with autism can learn through observing a Robotic Social Environment (RSE). The proposed RSE consisted of two parrot-like robots and a robotic ball to enable us to teach children with autism both social and nonsocial skills. The results on data from six high functioning children with autism show that the children learned an unknown skill, such as how to play with the robotic ball, through observing the robots. Furthermore, the results show that, despite limited capabilities of our robots for social interaction (i.e., voice-based social interaction), the children could understand the social characteristics, such as turn taking of the designed RSE.