FACET: a human-robot interaction platform for emotional and social training

Nowadays personality disorders have become a social plague. Social and behavioral difficulties very often lead to segregation and social impairment. On the basis of various psychological studies we believe that highly bealiveble humanlike robots can be used as emotional conveying systems for training people with social impairments. Our implementation is organized in two parallel branches: an innovative humanoid robot emotional control library and a pervasive acquisition platform for human-robot interaction studies. The integration of these two systems creates a complete platform for robot mediated emotional therapy for people with behavioral and social impairments. While the platform is continuously upgraded, preliminary tests of its present embodiment conducted on a panel of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show excellent results in term of acceptability and quality of the acquired data. Keywords—Social robots, Human robot interaction, Affective computing, Autism (ASD).