Humanoid Robots to Help Autistic Children

How an autistic child learns is very different from how a regular child is taught. It is with this difference in mind that researchers at the University of Southern California came up with the concept of individualized prompts for the autistic child from a humanoid robot to help in learning faster and with greater ease.

Over the course of the experiment a general improvement was noticed in learning imitative behavior in autistic children by interacting with humanoid robots that provided graded cueing. This is a therapy used with such children that shapes their behavior by providing them increasingly specific cues to help them learn new skills.

Nao Robots were used during the scientific study to interact with the children as they were told to perform specific tasks. The Nao Robots would first provide an instruction, followed by verbal clues, and eventually a demonstration of what was expected if the child still was unable to perform the task.

The robots would stop between each clue stage to allow the child to perform the task being described. The robot-mediated interventions in performing a task that was set for the children in the study were highly effective. The pilot science project has given hope that the technique would be successful at a larger scale as well.