The Autism News

The Autism News | English

By Space Daily

Robots that can cook, dance to Michael Jackson songs or guide the blind are among the gadgets aimed at helping humans cope with illnesses on display in Spain at one of the world’s biggest annual gatherings of new technology enthusiasts.

Standing 58 centimetres (23 inches) tall and with a plastic shell for a body, a humanoid robot called Nao drew a crowd at the Campus Party in Valencia as it danced to Jackson’s “Billie Jean” with a black hat on its head.

“I am thrilled to be at the Campus Party!” it said in in a mechanical voice in English.

The robot can recognize voices and faces and be instructed to turn on a personal computer, read e-mails or an online newspaper as well as be used to stimulate sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease with memory exercises.

“It is a companion robot; at the same time it is a robot that can help with day to day tasks,” said Romain Daros of French firm Aldebaran Robotics which designed Nao.

The company plans to start selling the robot in 2011 for between 3,000 and 3,500 euros (4,200 and 4,900 dollars).

Another star at the week-long event which wraps up on Sunday is a robot covered in artificial white fur called Paro that resembles a seal pup which can perceive people and its environment.

The cuddly robot has a diurnal rhythm, being active during the day but getting sleepy at night and reacts when it is spoken to or stroked.

It was designed by Japan’s largest public research organization, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, with the aim of helping people with cognitive problems like autism or dementia.

People with severe memory loss can be prone to psychiatric disturbances, including hallucinations and personality changes, and the robot can provide a way to calm them or at least shift their mood.

It is also useful in engaging children in pediatric wards and can help people with autism, who struggle to communicate socially and have trouble understanding facial expressions, learn how to interact better with others.

“A seal was chosen because it does not arouse any emotional memories, like a dog or a cat would,” said Ignacio Villoch, the marketing director of Spanish bank BBVA’s innovation centre which is presenting the robot in Spain.

Paro is already available for sale in Japan and several northern European nations.

Just several metres (yards) away Sylvain Calinon of Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology presented his robot, a “chef” that can cook.

Calinon said that unlike other robots, his “learns new gestures by imitation, by observation, without needing an intermediary” like a computer programmer.

The robot has already learned how to beat eggs and cut ham to make an omelet.

“We can imagine for example that it could feed people who can’t feed themselves with their own hands,” said Calinon.

The gathering at the futuristic “City of Arts and Sciences” also provided space for non-professionals to display their creations and many were also designed to aid ill or handicapped people even if they were more rudimentary.

One of them, Jose Alberto Garcia, proudly showed off his three-legged robot called Invigbot which emits a sound when it approaches an obstacle.

“He was conceived to serve as a guide for the blind,” the 22-year-old said.

Around 6,000 people are expected to attend the Campus Party, which unites participants from all over the world to share ideas, experiences and all types of activities related to computers, communications and new technology.

The annual event began in Spain in 1997. Editions of the event have since been held in Brazil and Colombia.

Source: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/New_robots_help_humans_cope_with_illness_999.html

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The Autism News English humanoid robot, Nao, robot, robots

The Autism News | English

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Marek Michalowski’s favorite robot looks like an oversized Easter peep that can bust some moves.

His name is Keepon, and he is best known as the star of a YouTube video — dancing to an infectious tune by the rock group Spoon — that has been viewed more than 2 million times.

But Keepon is much more than a disco robot.

In the hands of Mr. Michalowski, a Ph.D. student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and his mentor, Hideki Kozima of Miyagi University in Japan, Keepon is also being used to study how children interact socially, and whether the robot might particularly be able to help children with autism.

Mr. Michalowski has now formed a company, BeatBots LLC, and said he hopes the revenue from selling commercial versions of Keepon will one day help fund their research.

For the past few years, Mr. Michalowski and Dr. Kozima have been tracking groups of preschool children in Japan as they interact with Keepon in their classrooms.

Despite being only 5 inches tall, Keepon has enough room to accommodate a camera behind its eyes and a microphone behind its nose. That allows the researchers to observe the children from a robot’s eye view and change Keepon’s movement in response to what the children say and do.

Videos of some of those encounters show the children feeding Keepon pretend food, giving it pretend medicine when it has a Band-Aid on its head, and trying to find Keepon’s lost hat. It also shows the girls protecting Keepon after one of the boys whacks its head with a stick.

After shooing the boys away, one of the preschool girls turns to another, shakes her head, and says, “Boys are all the same.”

The most poignant video, compiled over several weeks, shows one girl with autism who slowly begins to forge a relationship with the robot. In the early scenes, she is plastered against a far wall and won’t come near Keepon. Eventually, as her curiosity increases, she pulls her caregiver by the hand to come closer to the robot. Then she touches Keepon with a xylophone stick. Then, carefully, with her foot.

Finally, she cradles the robot’s head, coos toward it, and after weeks have gone by, gives it a kiss.

“You can imagine how the mother, when she was watching this video, was reduced to tears,” Mr. Michalowski said, “because she so rarely saw that interaction herself, and to see her daughter doing this through the robot was very moving.”

Despite having no arms or legs, Keepon manages to achieve lifelike movement with just four ranges of motion — swiveling side to side, rocking side to side, tipping to the front and back, and bouncing.

After attending Yale University and getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and psychology, Mr. Michalowski met Dr. Kozima through one of his professors and asked if he could intern with him in Japan.

During his first stint there, Dr. Kozima “put a Keepon on my desk and said, ‘Do something with it,’ and the first thing I thought was, ‘I think Keepon wants to dance.’ “

Mr. Michalowski was already a fan of the Austin, Texas, rock group Spoon, so he programmed the robot to make random combinations of movements in response to the heavy beat in the group’s song, “I Turn My Camera On,” and that became the video that’s been viewed on YouTube.

It became so popular, he said, that Wired magazine paid to produce a professionally directed video showing Dr. Kozima carrying Keepon around Tokyo, dancing to another Spoon tune and interacting with passers-by. Recently, a similar video was completed in Seoul, South Korea, he said.

While Keepon may have a therapeutic role with children, Mr. Michalowski’s Ph.D. work is looking at a more fundamental issue: How does movement shape our interactions with each other?

We all need to coordinate our body language with each other to have successful conversations and social contact, Mr. Michalowski noted. “For instance, the frequency with which you nod when someone is talking to you shows whether you understand what someone is saying, and all this turn-taking is a lot like a dance that we’re not conscious of all the time, but if you don’t do it right,” your partner will think you aren’t listening or that something is wrong with you.

Ironically, he said, if someone doesn’t move in a normal way, such as a person with autism, “you might even call the person robotic, because their timing is not quite right.”

Dr. Kozima designed Keepon to be as approachable and unthreatening as possible, and Mr. Michalowski believes that in some ways, it can actually come across as more humanoid by not looking so much like a human being.

“People ask, ‘Why don’t you give it some arms or a mouth?’, but the point is to take away as much as you can. We probably could even take away the nose. It’s the bilateral symmetry and the two eyes that are the most important visual cues for movement.”

One way of understanding that principle, he said, is to look at successful animated films. His favorite example is two films that came out in 2004 — “Polar Express” and “The Incredibles.”

“Polar Express” tried to make its characters as realistic as possible, while “The Incredibles” used a much more cartoonish approach to its characters.

“These two movies both had the same amount of computing power, the same kind of animators’ talent, but one tried to be photorealistic and one tried to be more of a caricature,” he said, “and of course, ‘The Incredibles’ was a much more successful movie.”

In the same way, he said, it is actually harder to make a “realistic” robot that people can relate to.

“You can choose to create a very complicated robot face that has a lot of controllable parts,” he said, “but if you’ve got 12 motors, you’ve got to coordinate to express an emotion just right, that’s not only a lot more work but has a much higher risk of failure.”

No matter what shape “emotional robots” take in the future, he does not necessarily see them looking like miniature humans.

“Just because we make robots social doesn’t mean they have to be humanoid. Keepon shares very little morphologically with a person.”

In fact, the last thing he expects is a robot like “Rosie” from “The Jetsons.”

“If we look at where household robots are going, it’s probably not going to look like a humanoid servant that makes sandwiches and washes dishes and mops the floor. That would be a very inefficient way of accomplishing tasks that would be solved more easily by specialized automation.”

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Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09061/952629-298.stm

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The Autism News English, English autism research, Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Kozima, keepon, Marek Michalowski, robot

ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2009) — The day that robot playmates help children with autism learn the social skills that they naturally lack has come a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child’s emotional state.

“There is a lot of research going on around the world today trying to use robots to treat children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It has shown that the children are attracted to robots, raising the promise that appropriately designed robots could play an important role in their treatment,” says Nilanjan Sarkar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University. “However, the efforts so far have been quite limited because they haven’t had a way to monitor the emotional state of the children, which would allow the robot to respond automatically to their reactions.”

If these limitations can be overcome, the use of robots to treat children with ASD could have a significant social and financial impact. One baby in every 150 born today in the United States is diagnosed with ASD, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined. Currently, treatment of these children involves a combination of behavioral, educational, physical, occupational and speech therapies, sometimes accompanied by medication for co-occurring conditions such as anxiety, irritability, bi-polar and other disorders. The average cost of caring for one person with autism for life is $3.2 million. In total, autism currently costs the U.S. more than $90 billion per year, and that cost is projected to double by 2017 due to the growing population of those affected.

Over the last five years, Sarkar has developed a method that uses physiological measurements, including heart rate, galvanic skin response, temperature and muscle response, to monitor the emotional state of individuals. His original motivation was to improve human-robot interactions. When his nephew was diagnosed with autism, however, Sarkar got the idea of applying the technique to aid children with ASD. So he sought out one of the leading authorities on the subject, Wendy Stone, professor of pediatrics and investigator at Vanderbilt’s Kennedy Center, and they formed a partnership to develop this new approach.

“I’m always interested in creative ways to study and treat autism, so, when Nilanjan approached me, I was willing to listen,” says Stone. “He had clearly done his homework and his proposal sounded like a great idea.”

This fall, Sarkar and Stone published two papers – one in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and one in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies – that describe the results of their first set of experiments, which were conducted with six children ranging in age from 13 to 16 years who had been diagnosed with ASD. A battery of physiological sensors were attached to the participants and they were asked to play two games. One was the computer game Pong. The other was a variant of Nerf basketball with the hoop and backboard attached to the end of a robotic arm that moves it back and forth or up and down. Graduate students Changchun Liu and Karla Conn participated in the studies.

The researchers report that the physiological data they gathered can be used to develop an affective model for each individual that can predict his or her emotional states of liking, anxiety and engagement with an accuracy of better than 80 percent. Furthermore, they showed that this information can be used in real time to alter the game configuration in ways that significantly increase the children’s degree of engagement.

“That’s the part that really nailed me,” says Stone, “that the robot can read the physiological cues of the person playing the game, control the distance and angle of the hoop, and that the person reported a more positive mood when the computer was responsive to his needs.”

The ability to accurately monitor a child’s emotional state is particularly important in treating ASD, Stone says: “Children with autism are not necessarily giving the kind of emotional cues that we know how to read. They are not necessarily good reporters of their inner feelings. If we know that the child is becoming upset or anxious, then we can help the child identify his or her own emotional state and implement strategies for monitoring and control. It is a concrete way to help them identify their own feelings.”

One of the most encouraging results of their preliminary research was discovering that the affective model works accurately in different settings. The model was based on the readings they took as the children played Pong. The game was changed in several ways: Ball and paddle speeds were varied, and computer-based opponents of different skill levels were introduced. This allowed the researchers to induce emotions of interest, boredom, anxiety and engagement in each of the participants. The model was then used to predict how each child would react to changes in the computer game. When they switched to robot basketball, they found that the model’s predictions were equally accurate.

“The model is about as good at identifying a child’s emotional state as an experienced therapist. When a child gets a new therapist, as often happens, there is a learning curve as the new therapist gets to know the child, whereas the accuracy of the model should continue to improve over time,” Sarkar points out.

A robot’s ability to provide consistent and predictable responses should be particularly useful for treating ASD. Each child has individual triggers. For example, one child may not like direct eye contact. Another might be upset by loud voices and sounds. Yet another may react when people get too close. Once a particular trigger is identified, a robot could be programmed to increase the stimulus at such a gradual rate that the child doesn’t notice it. The robot could also be programmed to back off when it senses that its responses are beginning to bother the child. In this fashion, it could build up the child’s tolerance to the problem stimulus. “Robots can be programmed to respond with a consistency that is difficult for humans to achieve,” Sarkar points out.

According to the autism expert, something that robots lack may also be an advantage in this setting. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of teaching social skills in a non-social situation that is less threatening. The children can be distracted by a lot of sensory stimuli coming at them. Social stimuli are particularly complex and can confuse them. So alternative methods of teaching that can subtract the social component could be very helpful as a beginning step,” Stone says.

In the future, the researchers foresee technologies like robots and virtual reality environments as taking over some of the burden of the behavioral therapy that is one of the most time-consuming and expensive aspects of ASD treatment.

“This approach holds great promise,” says Stone. “It will involve many steps and this is just the beginning. There are lots of different possible applications. So it is just a matter of finding the resources to explore them all.”

The research was supported by a grant from the Marino Autism Research Institute.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases…0217141544.htm

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The Autism News English children with autism, disorder, emotional state, English, monitor, playmates, robot