‘Autistic Robots’ for Embodied Emulation of Behaviors Typically Seen in Children with Different Autism Severities

Abstract

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.