Abstract

Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) defines the research re-garding robots which provide assistance to users through so-

cial interaction[Feil-Seifer and Mataríc, 2005]. Socially as-sistive robots are being studied for therapeutic use with chil-

dren with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It has been ob-served that children with ASD interact with robots differently

than with people or toys. This may indicate an intrinsic in-terest in such machines, which could be applied as a robot

augmentation for an intervention for children with ASD. Pre-liminary studies suggest that robots may act as intrinsically-

rewarding social partners for children with autism. However,enabling a robot to understand social behavior, and do so

while interacting with the child, is a challenging problem.Children are highly individual and thus technology used for

social interaction requires recognition of a wide-range of so-cial behavior.