How to teach robots interact with children?
People with autism see, hear and feel the world differently from other people, which affects how they interact with others. This makes communication-centred activities quite challenging for children with autism spectrum conditions (ASCs). Therapists therefore find it difficult to engage them in these activities during educational therapy. To address this challenge, therapists recently began to use humanoid robots in therapy sessions. However, existing robots lack the ability to autonomously engage with children, which is vital for improving the therapy. And the fact that people with ASCs have atypical and diverse styles of expressing their thoughts and feelings makes the use of such robots even more challenging. Researchers working on the EU-funded project EngageME have now created a personalised machine learning framework for robots used during autism therapy. As they describe in their paper published in Science Robotics, this framework helps robots automatically perceive the a