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Robotics and Autonomous Systems Lab
at Vanderbilt

Robot-mediated Response to Joint Attention System for Children with Autism

Project: Robot-mediated Response to Joint Attention System for Children with Autism

Personnel: Zhi Zheng, Guangtao Nie, Jazette Johnson

Goals/Objectives:

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterized by deficits in social communication skills as well as repetitive and atypical patterns of behavior. It is suggested that behavioral intervention for children with autism can be efficacious if started at an early age. Response to joint attention is the receptive form of joint attention which refers to toddlers’ ability to follow caregiver’s gaze and gestures. It is considered to be one of the most important skills for social communication. This system is designed to help young children with ASD with their ability of response to joint attention. In the news

Outline:

This system consists of a humanoid robot, NAO, two monitors and an array of distributed cameras. Nao robot acts as a caregiver to initiate joint attention tasks. Two monitors are put on left and right as displaying modules. The camera array is employed to tack the head pose of the participant. In this system, we apply a real-time non-contact gaze detection method which allows us to not only eliminate the discomfort of wearing physical sensors, but also make the system run autonomously without any human interference.

Publications:

  • Zheng Z., Nie G., Swanson A., Weitlauf A., Warren Z., Sarkar N. (2016) Longitudinal Impact of Autonomous Robot-Mediated Joint Attention Intervention for Young Children with ASD. In: Agah A., Cabibihan JJ., Howard A., Salichs M., He H. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9979. Springer, Cham