Recent research has employed socially assistive robots as catalysts for social interaction and improved communicationinyoungchildrenwithautismspectrumdisorder (ASD).Studiesdescribeobservedtherapeuticoutcomessuch as increased speech, social interaction, joint and directed attention, but few detail a robot-inclusive protocol which evaluates a set of robot tasks using widely-accepted, clinical assessments to evaluate the efficacy of the approach. In this study, we employed a low-cost, toy-like robot prototype withsafetyfeaturessuchasasnap-offheadandtwosnap-off arms, a camera for face, hand detection and session recording, two autonomous games and a teleoperated mode. We thendevelopedandtestedanew,robot-assistedintervention. Eight study participants and three controls diagnosed with ASDandaspeechdeficiencywererecruited.Thestudygroup received pre-, post-intervention measures with the Vineland Adaptive Behavioral Scale II (VABS-II), mean length spontaneous utterance determination (MLSUD), motor imitation scale (MIS), unstructured imitation assessment (UIA) and Expressive Vocabulary Test 2 (EVT-2) and participated in twelve 30 min interventions. To explore the efficacy of the robot and new robot-assisted intervention we (1) measured improvements in spontaneous speech, communication
and social skills using standard measures of performance, (2) compared improvements observed with a study group receivingtherobot-assistedinterventionwithacontrolgroup receiving speech therapy but no robot-assisted intervention and, (3) validated a set of robot behaviors that may inform an integrated, cross-platform, approach for incorporating an autonomous, robot-assisted ASD intervention within a clinical methodology. Paired-samples t test results indicate significantly improved adaptive functioning in the VABSII socialization and communication domains, MLSUD, UIA SocialInteraction,UIARequesting,andUIAJointAttention domains. Between-group analyses also suggest significant improvement in VABS-II Play and Leisure, Receptive Language subdomains and trends in VABS-II Coping Skills and Interpersonal Scale subdomains

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• A low-cost socially assistive robot and robot-assisted intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder: field trials and lessons learned