Movement imitation underlying coaching platform for children with ASD

Abstract

This paper presents a movement imitation platform which offers a natural way for coaching children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The system is built up by a NAO humanoid robot that mimics the upper limb movement, and a depth camera that captures the action of human. We use skeleton tracking data of upper limb with SDK, and then calculate the joint angles and positions of the upper limbs; The posture parameters of upper limb are scaled and then transformed into those of the NAO robot' joints. The tests on both normal adults and children with ASD show that the system performs robust for upper limb imitation <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .