Human-Socially Assistive Robot Interaction for Improving Joint Attention in Children with Autism

Robots, especially humanoid robot are going to be used in various fields, among them therapy fields. A new approach was emergedwhich utilized robots to improve the social skill, not physical skill. This approach was dealing with three challenges: firstly, autismcreates a special condition that the patient dose not easily accept a therapist, so in the first step the researcher had to find a solutionfor interacting with autistic children, the second challenge was selecting appropriate algorithms,methods for eye tracking andhead pose detection with these children who have inaccurate eye center localization as well. The third one included the treatment andresearch process which should not over stimulate the children. To overcome the mentioned challenges, a real time eye gaze trackingalgorithm with high robustness as well as a fuzzy decision making tree for interacting the medial,engineering information wereutilized during the treatment that were implemented on a humanoid robot. Whereas none of the commercial hardware used.