Robotic agents used to help teach social skills to individuals with autism: The fourth generation

Robotic platforms have been developed and investigated as educationally useful interventions to improve social interactions among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In this paper, the development of a new generation of robotic agent is described, which uses economically available robotic platforms (Lego NXT) as Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR). In this generation, the robots were physically designed with maintainability, reliability, maneuverability, and aesthetics in mind; and the software architecture was designed for modularity, configurability, and reusability of the software.