An Interactive Robot Facilitating Social Skills for Children

In this paper, we propose an interactive robot system to facilitate easy improvement of children's social capability, with robot-assisted interventions effectively offering social skill training for children with autism. This is achieved through therapeutic protocols with therapy, encouragement, and pause modes, which are determined by behavioral responses of children. Furthermore, the robot evaluates the level of children's reactivity in the child-robot interaction by recognition modules for frontal face and touch, and it generates appropriate training tasks through the combination of kinesic acts and displayable contents. From the experiments of the interplay training with autistic and non-autistic children, it is verified that the proposed system has positive effects on social development of children with autism spectrum disorders.