Robotic system for eye contact training of children with autism

The proposed method is a robotic system for behavior intervention of children with autism who have deficit in development of communication and interaction with others. This robotic system helps the social training of children with autism in that robot reacts as a social being. We aim to improve the eye contact skill of children with autism, one of main indicators of their development. This paper describes our hardware configuration and methods for analyzing a child behavior based on vision and auditory information, and our human-robot interaction (HRI) architecture. At the end, preliminary experimental results with a non-autistic child will be presented.

[1]  C. Corsello,et al.  Early Intervention in Autism , 2005 .

[2]  H. Kozima,et al.  Interactive Robots as Facilitators of Childrens Social Development , 2006 .

[3]  W. Eric L. Grimson,et al.  Adaptive background mixture models for real-time tracking , 1999, Proceedings. 1999 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Cat. No PR00149).

[4]  Hiroshi Ishiguro,et al.  Motion modification method to control affective nuances for robots , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[5]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Robust Real-Time Face Detection , 2001, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[6]  Z. Zivkovic Improved adaptive Gaussian mixture model for background subtraction , 2004, ICPR 2004.

[7]  Peter H. Kahn,et al.  Robotic animals might aid in the social development of children with autism , 2008, 2008 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[8]  Maja J. Mataric,et al.  Toward Socially Assistive Robotics for Augmenting Interventions for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders , 2008, ISER.

[9]  Daniel J. Ricks,et al.  Trends and considerations in robot-assisted autism therapy , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  B. Robins,et al.  Does appearance matter in the interaction of children with autism with a humanoid robot , 2006 .

[11]  Michael Isard,et al.  CONDENSATION—Conditional Density Propagation for Visual Tracking , 1998, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[12]  Maja J. Mataric,et al.  Automated detection and classification of positive vs. negative robot interactions with children with autism using distance-based features , 2011, 2011 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[13]  Neil J. Gordon,et al.  A tutorial on particle filters for online nonlinear/non-Gaussian Bayesian tracking , 2002, IEEE Trans. Signal Process..