Co-Robot Therapy to Foster Social Skills in Special Need Learners: Three Pilot Studies

Three studies are described in which co-robot therapy with the humanoid robot NAO is used to foster social skills in three subjects with special needs – two subjects with autism spectrum disorder and one subject with developmental delay, speech-language impairments, and tantruming/yelling. The social skills include imitation, attention, pro-social behavior, joint attention, turn-taking, and initiative. We discuss the base-line performance of the subjects in each study. The contributions of the paper are (i) the use of soft systems methodology to guide co-robot therapy over a multiplicity of incremental therapy sessions, (ii) studies in messy real-world environments, and (iii) the transition from a tele-operated robot to an intelligent agent-based robot.