Interactive social robots in special education

This paper presents advances in robot-assisted special education by specially designed social interaction games. The therapeutic objectives include an improvement in social communication and interaction skills, joint attention, response inhibition and cognitive flexibility of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). To achieve the aforementioned objectives, imitation games with humanoid robots are implemented. Preliminary application results suggest that robot-assisted treatment can improve children behavior. Hence, an engagement of humanoid robots in special education is encouraged. Further improvements are planned by computational intelligence techniques toward increasing the humanoid robot autonomy.