Toward Autonomous Child-Robot Interaction: Development of an Interactive Architecture for the Humanoid Kaspar Robot

Recently, the development and deployment of social robots to support children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) has attracted the attention of researchers in different fields. The main aim of this multidisciplinary research field is to teach and improve the social skills and capabilities of the children through interacting and playing with robots however, due to the spontaneous nature of children with ASC, as well as the inherent complexity of developing autonomous interactive robots, creating such systems is a challenging task. In this paper, we present our progress in the context of the BabyRobot project, towards developing an interactive humanoid robot to support autonomous child-robot interactions (CRI). We have been developing an interactive sensethink-act architecture to enable the humanoid robot Kaspar to display goal-oriented adaptive behaviours while playing, communicating, and collaborating with children. The final part of this paper reports on the initial tests of the proposed interactive architecture.