Editorial: Human-robot interaction for children with special needs.

educational/treatment classes will be unavoidable in the next few years. Many studies have indicated the 5 positive aspects of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) platforms for children. For example, specially designed 6 social robots with cute characteristics can facilitate effective engagement levels and compliance of children 7 with special needs toward teachers/therapists and robots in robot-assisted classes (Ghorbandaei-Pour et al., 8 2018;Taheri et al., 2018Taheri et al., , 2021. Moreover, socially assistive robots could play a catalytic role in making the 9 education and social/cognitive rehabilitation process of children more appealing in a friendly environment, 10 and this could increase the attention span of the participants and their tendency to become deeply involved 11 in educational/treatment tasks (Basiri et al., 2021a,b). Alternatively, educational and therapeutic robots