Autonomous robot-mediated imitation learning for children with autism

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) impact 1 in 88 children in the United States. The cost of ASD intervention is tremendous with huge individual and social consequences. In recent years, robotic systems have been introduced with considerable success for ASD intervention because of their potential to engage children with ASD. In this work, we present a novel closed-loop autonomous robotic system for imitation skill learning for ASD intervention. Children with ASD show powerful impairment in imitation, which has been associated with a host of neurodevelopmental and learning challenges over time. The presented robotic system offers dynamic, adaptive and autonomous interaction for learning of imitation skills with real-time performance evaluation and feedback. The system has been tested in a user study with young children with ASD and typically developing (TD) control sample. Further, the performance of the system was compared with that of a human therapist in the user study. The results demonstrate that the developed robotic system is well-tolerated by the target population, engaged the children with ASD more than a human therapist, and produced performances that were relatively better than that of a human therapist.