Design of Robot for Autism Children Social-Skill Training

Loh, Peng Jing (2021) Design of Robot for Autism Children Social-Skill Training. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Nowadays, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a hot topic that is widely focused by citizens and the government. There are some methods to help an autism child improve in the symptoms, one of the ways is implemented by Robot-Assisted-Therapy (RAT) and there are many examples of research papers show that robots can assist the autism children and help them to enhance their social skills. The aim is to develop a humanoid social robot that can implement social-skill training to the autism children and analyse the improvement of their social behaviours and communication after interacting with the robot. It will also include an attention checker and grabber to attract autism children’s attention during the therapy session to increase the effectiveness of the robot in implementing social-skill training. The design of the robot will be a small LCD screen display as head of the robot and servos as arm and leg of the robot. The other body parts will be printed using a 3D printer and a Raspberry Pi is used as the brain of the robot. The robot can perform social storytelling to the autism child and move its hands to show hand gestures to the child for further understanding. The social story contains some social scenarios, and there will be some pictures or videos to demonstrate the scenario to the child. After the storytelling, the robot will give social tasks according to the scenario above and the autism child will be judged on how they follow the social task before and after the sessions of the therapy. The robot cannot receive the voices and hand gestures from the autism child is one of the technical limitations since there is no built-in microphone and the camera is used only for attention checking. This will contribute to society and psychology since ASD causes many difficulties for people.