Robots and autistic children: a review

Abstract

In accordance with the advancement in robotics and the scholarly literature, the extents of utilizing robots for autistic children are widened and could be a promising method for individual with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) treatments, where the different form of robot (humanoid, non-humanoid, animal-like, toy, and kits) can be employed effectively as a support tool to augment the learning skills and rehabilitate of the individual with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Thus, the robots were exploited for ASD children in different aspects namely; modelling, teaching, and skills practicing; testing, highlighting and evaluating; providing feedback or encouragement; join Attention; eliciting social behaviours; emotion recognition and expression; imitation; vocalization; turn-taking; and diagnostic. The related literature published recently in journals and conferences is taken into account. In this paper, we review the use of robots that help in the therapy of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The articles on using robots for autistic children rehabilitation and education which reported results of experiments on a number of participants were implicated. After looking in digital libraries under this criteria, and excluding non-related, and duplicated studies, 39 studies have been found. The findings were focused mainly on the social communication skills of autistic children and how the extent of the robots mitigate their stereotyped behaviours. Deeper research is required in this area to cover all applications of robotic on autistic children in order to design feasible and low-cost robots that ensure provide high validity.