The Design, Development, and Deployment of RoboParrot for Screening Autistic Children

Abstract

Recent research shows that Human Robot Interaction (HRI) can play an important role in the screening and therapy of many disorders, and suggests broad range of applications for children with developmental disorders. This paper presents the design, development, and application of a parrot-like robot as a screening tool to diagnose autistic children. The interactions of several autistic children with the robot have been observed and compared to the interaction of a group of normal children with the robot to determine the important behavioral features separating the autistic children from the normal ones. Based on these observations, we developed a descriptive research methodology to specify important and discriminating features for screening autism using behavioral aspects in social interaction, communication, and stereotyped and repetitive behaviors. Our experiments show that there are significant differences between autistic and normal children pertaining to their communication with the robot, repetitive behaviors and sustaining attention. The results show the effectiveness of using robots in screening developmental disorders such as autism, highlighting the importance of Robot Assisted Screening (RAS) or intelligent toys in this field. We have determined 6 features extracted from the children’s behavior, and Random Forest method is used to distinguish between the autistic and normal children. The system has been tested on 51 children, 35 autistic and 16 normal, with maximum 90 % correct classification rate.