TYPE Original Research PUBLISHED 24 April 2023 DOI 10.3389/frobt.2023.1088582 OPEN ACCESS EDITED BY Kosmas Dimitropoulos, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Greece REVIEWED BY Sofiane Boucenna, Equipes Traitement de l'Information et Systèmes (ETIS), France Andrea Bonarini, Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy *CORRESPONDENCE Hadi Moradi, moradih@ut.ac.ir RECEIVED 03 November 2022 ACCEPTED 03 April 2023 PUBLISHED 24 April 2023 CITATION Soleiman P, Moradi H, Mehralizadeh B, Ameri H, Arriaga RI, Pouretemad HR, Baghbanzadeh N and Vahid LK (2023), Fully robotic social environment for teaching and practicing affective interaction: Case of teaching emotion recognition skills to children with autism spectrum disorder, a pilot study. Front. Robot. AI 10:1088582. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2023.1088582 COPYRIGHT © 2023 Soleiman, Moradi, Mehralizadeh, Ameri, Arriaga, Pouretemad, Baghbanzadeh and Vahid. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Fully robotic social environment for teaching and practicing affective interaction: Case of teaching emotion recognition skills to children with autism spectrum disorder, a pilot study Pegah Soleiman 1 , Hadi Moradi 1,2 *, Bijan Mehralizadeh 3 , Hamed Ameri 4 , Rosa I. Arriaga 5 , Hamid Reza Pouretemad 6 , Negin Baghbanzadeh 1 and Leila Kashani Vahid 7 1 School of ECE, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, 2 Intelligent Systems Research Institute, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Republic of Korea, 3 School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, 4 Department of Psychology, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, 5 School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States, 6 Department of Psychology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran, 7 Department of Psychology, Islamic Azad University Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran 21st century brought along a considerable decrease in social interactions, due to the newly emerged lifestyle around the world, which became more noticeable recently of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, children with autism spectrum disorder have further complications regarding their social interactions with other humans. In this paper, a fully Robotic Social Environment (RSE), designed to simulate the needed social environment for children, especially those with autism is described. An RSE can be used to simulate many social situations, such as affective interpersonal interactions, in which observational learning can take place. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed RSE, it has been tested on a group of children with autism, who had difficulties in emotion recognition, which in turn, can influence social interaction. An A- B-A single case study was designed to show how RSE can help children with autism recognize four basic facial expressions, i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, through observing the social interactions of two robots speaking about these facial expressions. The results showed that the emotion recognition skills of the participating children were improved. Furthermore, the results showed that the children could maintain and generalize their emotion recognition skills after the intervention period. In conclusion, the study shows that the proposed RSE, along with other rehabilitation methods, can be effective in improving the emotion recognition skills of children with autism and preparing them to enter human social environments. KEYWORDS robotic social environment, social interaction, observational learning, emotion recognition, autism Frontiers in Robotics and AI 01 frontiersin.org