Children with autism have problems interacting with others, feel overwhelmed by personal interaction and may have difficulty concentrating their attention and learning social skills. The use of robots for these types of problems is increasing.
One of the groups working on this topic is LuxAI, a company of the University of Luxembourg, which has developed QTrobot, a robot that can increase these children’s willingness to interact with human therapists and reduce inconvenience during therapy sessions.
On August 28, they will present their results at RO-MAN 2018, the International IEEE Symposium on Interactive Communication between Robots and Humans, in Nanjing, China. In the presentation, they will support the use of robots, because every time they say something or perform a task, it is exactly the same as before, and that gives comfort to children with autism. These children, who feel comfortable with a robot, can better focus their attention on a curriculum that the robot and a human therapist present together.
They recently held a demonstration in which 15 children aged 4 to 14 took part in two interactions: one with QTrobot and the other with only one person. The children looked at the robot for twice as long, and the repetitive movements, which show fear, occurred about three times more frequently during the sessions with humans.
Robot-based autism therapy has been under investigation for more than a decade (some will be familiar with the KASPAR social robot project in the late 1990s), and now LuxAI has started building this new robot in 2016, completed a final prototype in mid-2017 and started testing this year at several sites in Luxembourg, France, Belgium, and Germany.
The robot is easily programmable by autism professionals without any technical training and can work for hours without having to close for cooling. It also has a powerful processor and a 3D camera, so you don’t need any additional equipment, such as a laptop.