Exploratory Study: Children's with Autism Awareness of being Imitated by Nao Robot

Andreea Peca (1) , Adriana Tapus (2) , Amir Aly (3) , Cristina Pop (1) , Lavinia Jisa (1) , Sebastian Pintea (1) , Alina Rusu (1) , Daniel David (1)

1 UBB - Babes-Bolyai University [Cluj-Napoca]
2 U2IS - Unité d'Informatique et d'Ingénierie des Systèmes
3 RV - Robotique et Vision

This paper presents an exploratory study designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) that investigates children's awareness of being imitated by a robot in a play/game scenario. The Nao robot imitates all the arm movement behaviors of the child in real-time in dyadic and triadic interactions. Different behavioral criteria (i.e., eye gaze, gaze shifting, initiation and imitation of arm movements, smile/laughter) were analyzed based on the video data of the interaction. The results confirm only parts of the research hypothesis. However, these results are promising for the future directions of this work.

Mots clés: imitation; autism; human-robot interaction; assistive robotics

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Psychologie

Andreea Peca, Adriana Tapus, Amir Aly, Cristina Pop, Lavinia Jisa, et al.. Exploratory Study: Children's with Autism Awareness of being Imitated by Nao Robot. The 1st International Conference on Innovative Technologies for Autism Spectrum Disorders. ASD: Tools, Trends and Testimonials (ITASD), Jul 2012, Valencia, Spain. ⟨hal-01158338⟩