Developing child-robot interaction scenarios with a humanoid robot to assist children with autism in developing visual perspective taking skills

Abstract

Children with autism often find it difficult to understand that other people might have perspectives, viewpoints, beliefs and knowledge that are different from their own. One fundamental aspect of this difficulty is Visual Perspective Taking (VPT). Visual perspective taking is the ability to see the world from another person's perspective, taking into account what they see and how they see it, drawing upon both spatial and social information. In this paper, we outline the child-robot interaction scenarios that we have developed as part of the European BabyRobot project to assist children with autism explore elements that are important in developing VPT skills. Further to this we describe the standard pre and post assessments that we will perform with the children in order to measure their progress. The games were implemented with the Kaspar robot. To our knowledge this is the first attempt to improve the VPT skills of children with autism through playing and interacting with a humanoid robot.