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Robotic Social Environments: A Promising Platform for Autism Therapy

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12483))

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Abstract

Observational learning, especially in social environments, is considered an important part of the learning process in a human development. Unfortunately, children with autism lack this learning ability, especially in human social environments due to their deficiency in social interaction. Consequently, in this paper we present a pilot study in which we show that children with autism can learn through observing a Robotic Social Environment (RSE). The proposed RSE consisted of two parrot-like robots and a robotic ball to enable us to teach children with autism both social and nonsocial skills. The results on data from six high functioning children with autism show that the children learned an unknown skill, such as how to play with the robotic ball, through observing the robots. Furthermore, the results show that, despite limited capabilities of our robots for social interaction (i.e., voice-based social interaction), the children could understand the social characteristics, such as turn taking of the designed RSE.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of ECE, University of Tehran, North Karegar Street, Tehran, Iran

    Pegah Soleiman, Hadi Moradi, Negin Azizi & Farid Anjidani

  2. Intelligent Systems Research Institute, SKKU, Suwon, South Korea

    Hadi Moradi

  3. School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Tehran, North Karegar Street, Tehran, Iran

    Bijan Mehralizadeh

  4. Department of Psychology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

    Hamid Reza Pouretemad

  5. School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Rosa I. Arriaga

Authors
  1. Pegah Soleiman
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  2. Hadi Moradi
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  3. Bijan Mehralizadeh
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  4. Negin Azizi
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  5. Farid Anjidani
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  6. Hamid Reza Pouretemad
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  7. Rosa I. Arriaga
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hadi Moradi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Alan R. Wagner

  2. University of Nevada Reno, Reno, NV, USA

    David Feil-Seifer

  3. University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Kerstin S. Haring

  4. University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy

    Silvia Rossi

  5. Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA

    Thomas Williams

  6. Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

    Hongsheng He

  7. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Shuzhi Sam Ge

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Soleiman, P. et al. (2020). Robotic Social Environments: A Promising Platform for Autism Therapy. In: Wagner, A.R., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62056-1_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62056-1_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62055-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62056-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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