USC Viterbi: What role, if any, can socially assistive robots play as kids on the spectrum get older? How might they be valuable to adults? So we need to develop truly human-centric ethical technologies, including robots.” Some of that support must come from other people, but so much is needed, that some of it must come from technology. “I would like to contribute to the future in which all people have support they need to thrive and reach their potential. These are the same questions that any type of therapy must address. We hope to better understand just how effective SAR can be in this context, how do children interact with SAR in the home, do the robots promote social behaviors in the long run – not just initially – and do those learned social behaviors transfer to interactions without the robot present. That is what makes SAR a great potential tool for ASD therapy. It is a perfect example of a challenge that demands a completely personalized solution, one that is adapted to the child and changes with the child’s development and evolving needs. Maja Matarić: Autism is a complex and still poorly understood challenge with a constellation of symptoms and severities. What role do you see these robots playing in the day-to-day lives of kids with ASD? USC Viterbi: Share a bit about the vision for the future. Because this is a very complex experiment, we will start it only when we are fully ready, and that is most likely going to be mid-summer.
Both studies involve a pairing of a robot and a tablet for the interaction with children and families, but each study will use different robots and has different specific scenarios it will explore, in order to maximize how much we learn from this great opportunity. One of the studies will be led by Yale University and the other by USC. Maja Matarić: As part of our National Science Foundation (NSF) supported Expeditions in Computing grant, we are going to conduct an ambitious study involving placing socially assistive robots in homes with one or more children with autism for a month, in order to learn how families interact with such robots in the course of everyday life. USC Viterbi: You are in the midst of arguably the largest autism and robots study conducted by a university. These elements are critical yet missing due to the lack of accessible, trained and affordable human care, so I was inspired to create personalized robots that could provide just that. – I discovered that it is a combination of support, motivation and companionship. In learning about what most people need, regardless of the special situation they were in – recovery, rehabilitation, retraining, etc. This led me to the field of assistive robotics. Maja Matarić: About 15 years ago, I was defining a new direction of research and was inspired to pursue something that would enable robots to directly benefit numerous people, especially those who truly needed help. USC Viterbi: Of all the potential research areas, why has socially assistive robots (SAR) and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) galvanized your attention? Why this, why now? Maja Matarić, vice dean of research, USC Viterbi School of Engineering