Investigating tactile event recognition in child-robot interaction for use in autism therapy

The work presented in this paper is part of our investigation in the ROBOSKIN project. The project aims to develop and demonstrate a range of new robot capabilities based on robot skin tactile feedback from large areas of the robot body. The main objective of the project is to develop cognitive mechanisms exploiting tactile feedback to improve human-robot interaction capabilities. The project aims also to investigate the possible use of this technology in robot-assisted play in the context of autism therapy. This article reports progress made in investigating tactile child-robot interactions where children with autism interacted with the humanoid robot KASPAR equipped with the first prototype of skin patches, introducing a new algorithm for tactile event recognition which will enhance the observational data analysis that has been used in the past.