A Control Architecture of Robot-Assisted Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Robot-assisted intervention has been successfully applied to the education and training of children with autism spectrum disorders. However, it is necessary to increase the autonomy of the robot to reduce the burden on the human therapists. This paper focuses on proposing a robotic architecture to improve the autonomy of the robot in the course of the interaction between the robot and the child with autism. Following the model of perception-cognition-action, the architecture also incorporates some of the concepts of traditional autism intervention approach and the human cognitive model. The details of the robotic architecture are described in this paper, and in the end, a typical scenario is used to verify the proposed method.