KASPAR in the wild - Initial findings from a pilot study

This extended abstract describes the initial pilot work when evaluating the use of the UH Humanoid Robot KASPAR in a specialist nursery for children with social and communication disorders. Staff and volunteers at the nursery were trained in the use of KASPAR and are currently using KASPAR in their day to day activities in the nursery. This paper focuses on the design and results from the initial interviews with the participants. Results high-light the challenges of transferring experimental technologies like KASPAR from a research setting into everyday practice

Development of a Semi-Autonomous Robotic System to Assist Children with Autism in Developing Visual Perspective Taking Skills

Robot-assisted therapy has been successfully used to help children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) develop their social skills, but very often with the robot being fully controlled remotely by an adult operator. Although this method is reliable and allows the operator to conduct a therapy session in a customised child-centred manner, it increases the cognitive workload on the human operator since it requires them to divide their attention between the robot and the child to ensure that the robot is responding appropriately to the child's behaviour. In addition, a remote-controlled robot is not aware of the information regarding the interaction with children (e.g., body gesture and head pose, proximity etc) and consequently it does not have the ability to shape live HRIs. Further to this, a remote-controlled robot typically does not have the capacity to record this information and additional effort is required to analyse the interaction data. For these reasons, using a remote-controlled robot in robot-assisted therapy may be unsustainable for long-term interactions. To lighten the cognitive burden on the human operator and to provide a consistent therapeutic experience, it is essential to create some degrees of autonomy and enable the robot to perform some autonomous behaviours during interactions with children. Our previous research with the Kaspar robot either implemented a fully autonomous scenario involving pairs of children, which then lacked the often important input of the supervising adult, or, in most of our research, has used a remote control in the hand of the adult or the children to operate the robot. Alternatively, this paper provides an overview of the design and implementation of a robotic system called Sense- Think-Act which converts the remote-controlled scenarios of our humanoid robot into a semi-autonomous social agent with the capacity to play games autonomously (under human supervision) with children in the real-world school settings. The developed system has been implemented on the humanoid robot Kaspar and evaluated in a trial with four children with ASC at a local specialist secondary school in the UK where the data of 11 Child-Robot Interactions (CRIs) was collected. The results from this trial demonstrated that the system was successful in providing the robot with appropriate control signals to operate in a semi-autonomous manner without any latency, which supports autonomous CRIs, suggesting that the proposed architecture appears to have promising potential in supporting CRIs for real-world applications.Peer reviewe

Study to investigate the effectiveness of using a humanoid robot (Kaspar) to improve the social skills of children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder: a randomised controlled feasibility trial

Peer reviewe

The Iterative Development of the Humanoid Robot Kaspar: An Assistive Robot for Children with Autism

This paper gives an overview of the design and development of the humanoid robot Kaspar. Since the first Kaspar robot was developed in 2005, the robotic platform has undergone continuous development driven by the needs of users and technological advancements enabling the integration of new features. We discuss in detail the iterative development of Kaspar’s design and clearly explain the rational of each development, which has been based on the user requirements as well as our years of experience in robot assisted therapy for children with autism, particularly focusing on how the developments benefit the children we work with. Further to this, we discuss the role and benefits of robotic autonomy on both children and therapist along with the progress that we have made on the Kaspar robot’s autonomy towards achieving a semi-autonomous child-robot interaction in a real world setting.Peer reviewe

Strong Neighborhoods: A Quality of Life Study in Auburn, Maine

This project was created in collaboration with Reine Mynahan, Community Development Director for the City of Auburn to survey Auburn residents and gather information regarding the quality of their life. The City of Auburn will receive funds from the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The purpose of the survey was to collect residents’ opinions on where the HUD funds should be allocated to best benefit the community. According to the City’s 2011-2014 Consolidated Plan, their main goals are to create affordable housing, safe neighborhoods, and economic development. Our group along with two others, a total of nine students, administered the survey in three neighborhoods in Auburn: Downtown, Union Street, and New Auburn. Based on a recent city survey of blighted areas, these neighborhood boundaries were determined by areas that exhibit conditions of blight, which are in need of the most assistance. Our group was assigned to survey Downtown Auburn. Although the three groups collected data separately, we made sure to maintain the same methods while conducting the survey in order to be consistent. The survey we administered gauged what Auburn residents would like to see improved in their community as well as what services are used and underused. Working with the other groups, we collected results that provide the perceptions of the social and physical conditions of these areas. Our results show that residents have a general discontented perception of the current state of their neighborhood. Many people were very opinionated on the subject of street safety. Changes they would like to see in the neighborhood include better housing, less traffic and more sidewalks. Other notable results are the fact that 75% of residents surveyed were renters, half of the people we surveyed have lived in Auburn for over 21 years and between all three neighborhoods, Downtown ranked as the poorest quality place to live (30%) among all three neighborhoods of study. We reported our results to the Citizen’s Advisory Committee (CAC), who will use our results to make recommendations to the City Counsel as to what projects they believe should take priority. This report includes any differences we see between the opinions of residents, similarities and differences between the three neighborhoods, and any other trends that appear important. This was presented to the CAC on December 2, 2014 and concluded our project

A Novel Reinforcement-Based Paradigm for Children to Teach the Humanoid Kaspar Robot

© The Author(s) 2019. This is the final published version of an article published in Psychological Research, licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-bution 4.0 International License. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00607-xThis paper presents a contribution to the active field of robotics research with the aim of supporting the development of social and collaborative skills of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). We present a novel experiment where the classical roles are reversed: in this scenario the children are the teachers providing positive or negative reinforcement to the Kaspar robot in order for the robot to learn arbitrary associations between different toy names and the locations where they are positioned. The objective of this work is to develop games which help children with ASD develop collaborative skills and also provide them tangible example to understand that sometimes learning requires several repetitions. To facilitate this game we developed a reinforcement learning algorithm enabling Kaspar to verbally convey its level of uncertainty during the learning process, so as to better inform the children interacting with Kaspar the reasons behind the successes and failures made by the robot. Overall, 30 Typically Developing (TD) children aged between 7 and 8 (19 girls, 11 boys) and 6 children with ASD performed 22 sessions (16 for TD; 6 for ASD) of the experiment in groups, and managed to teach Kaspar all associations in 2 to 7 trials. During the course of study Kaspar only made rare unexpected associations (2 perseverative errors and 1 win-shift, within a total of 272 trials), primarily due to exploratory choices, and eventually reached minimal uncertainty. Thus the robot's behavior was clear and consistent for the children, who all expressed enthusiasm in the experiment.Peer reviewe

Robota – mini-humanoid robot az autista gyerekek rehabilitációjára

A Robota projektben olyan, több szabadsági fokkal rendelkező humanoid robotokat alkotunk, amelyeknek a fizikai jellemzői a kisbabákra hasonlítanak. A Robota robotokat viselkedéstudományi kutatásban oktatástechnológiai segítségként használtuk autista, viselkedési problémákkal küszködő gyermekek körében