PI: Sarkar, Nilanjan and Warren, Zachary Proposal Number: 1264462
Project Summary: A novel and transformative robotic intervention technology, called ARIA (Adaptive Robot-mediated Intervention Architecture), with the potential to accelerate social communication skill development for young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is proposed in this research. ARIA will fluidly integrate a humanoid robot, multiple spatially distributed network of cameras, an array of display monitors, as well as a complex but efficient computational face, gaze and gesture detection methodology in order to create a highly flexible and adaptive intelligent environment to potentially advance early joint attention and imitation related skills for young children with ASD. Application of this system will be examined across two user studies with well-defined samples of young children with ASD to provide specific answers and direction to important questions of generalization and potential impact of robotic intervention.
Intellectual Merit: The proposed research advances the design and development of intelligent adaptive robotic platforms to offer a potentially transformative intervention application for young children with ASD. The specific technological innovation proposed here has the potential to significantly contribute to new non-invasive and closed-loop human-robot interaction learning paradigms with potential broad extension to individuals with a vast array of neurodevelopmental conditions and limiting sensory vulnerabilities across the lifespan. From the perspective of the science and technology of robotics, the project will contribute towards the design and development of smart environments for learning, intelligent system architecture for adaptive robotics as well as affective computing and control of dynamic human-robot interaction. In particular, it has the potential to significantly contribute towards developing novel efficient applications of computational methods for affective computing, particularly affective computing mediated by non-invasive gaze and attention processing. It will also contribute towards closed loop gesture-based human-robot interaction by developing new methodologies for gesture recognition and adaptive response from the robot. The project will develop a framework and tools to design adaptive environments for enhanced robotic and embodied social interaction that intelligently and fluidly integrates real-time behavioral indices of attentive and gesture information into flexible and controllable response systems. In short, the proposed activity represents a system has the potential to fundamentally advance the engineering knowledge of intelligent human-robotic interaction. This paradigm may also potently impact our understanding of the science of ASD intervention itself. The embedded user studies will test the potential efficacy of robotic intervention on the earliest core symptoms of ASD.
Broader Impacts: With the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prevalence estimates for children with ASD at 1 in 88, effective early identification and treatment is often characterized as a public health emergency. The costs of ASD are thought to be enormous across the lifespan, with recent individual incremental lifetime cost projections exceeding $3.2 million and national cost over $35 billion annually. The proposed research explicitly focuses on realizing robotic intervention technologies with potential for improving early ASD related impairments and could have significant beneficial impact on this population. This research may further a technology that can enable all core components of effective intervention at only a fraction of the cost of typical intervention programs, while at the same time increasing the ability of the intervention provider to systematically control and promote intervention related skills targeting individual deficit. The educational activities will train and mentor undergraduate and graduate students in the proposed research, and bring research into classroom through several courses. The outreach activities will include offering research opportunities to high school students, especially among groups currently underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, and providing high school teachers with research experience during summer. The project offers a strong community connection through formal dissemination to ASD family, clinical, and scientific communities.
