Current Research

Spatial Methods for Socially Assistive Robotics, Validation With Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders: There exists a great untapped potential for the use of intelligent robots as therapeutic social partners for children. However, enabling a robot to understand social behavior, and do so while interacting with the child, is a challenging problem. Children are highly individual and thus technology used for social interaction requires recognition of a wide-range of social behavior. This work addresses the challenge of designing behaviors for socially assistive robots in order to enable them to recognize and appropriately respond to a child’s free-form behavior in unstructured play contexts. The focus on free-form behavior is inspired by and grounded in existing approaches to therapeutic intervention with children with ASD. This model emphasizes creating circles of communication and fostering engagement through play. A key aspect of this approach is to recognize social behavior and use “engagements” to bolster social interaction behavior.

Detection and mitigation of a child’s distress: This work presents methodology for learning and applying a data-driven spatio-temporal model of social behavior based on distance-based features to automatically differentiate between typical child-robot interactive behavior and behavior that would suggest an aversive response. Using a Gaussian Mixture Model learned over distance-based feature data the developed system is able to detect and interpret social behavior of the child with sufficient accuracy to recognize distress on the part of the child. The robot will use this model to change its own behavior to encourage positive social interaction.

Software and Teaching

	The Robotics Primer Workbook: a stand-alone resource as well as a companion for "The Robotics Primer" by Maja J Mataric', published by MIT Press in June 2007. This workbook is designed as a general introduction to robotic programming. The exercises make use of the iRobot Create, a low-cost programmable mobile robot platform available from iRobot. An optional addition to the Create robot is the Gumstix computer, a small self contained computer about the size of a piece of gum.
	HRI bibliography: An online, editable bibliography of papers from HRI (and allied fields). Visitors are welcome to peruse the database, and add to it if they wish. Adapted from the BibORB Project.
	Lab curriculum for ENGR 499: The new Viterbi School of Engineering (VSoE) freshman all-engineering hands-on robotics course. This course was first taught in Fall 2007. It is now a regular annual fall semester course. It features a truly interdisciplinary team of top researchers from VSoE who will take turns lecturing in the course, and the opportunity to program most complex robotic systems used in any freshman course anywhere.