Towards Robot-Assisted Social Skills Training for
Adults with ASC
Peter McKenna
Frank Broz
Ingo Keller
Jose L. Part
Gnanathusharan Rajendran
Ruth Aylet
p.mckenna@hw.ac.uk
f.broz@hw.ac.uk
ijk1@hw.ac.uk
j.part@hw.ac.uk
t.rajendran@hw.ac.uk
r.s.aylet@hw.ac.uk
Heriot-Wat University
EH14 4AS Edinburgh, UK
ABSTRACT
Despite the popularity of research on robot-assisted therapy for children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), there has been a
lack of study of the use of robots in therapy for adults. This paper describes progress towards designing robot-assisted therapy for
adults with ASC that will allow people to rehearse workplace-relevant social skills. We summarize our prior work on designing
interpretable facial expressions for our low degree-of-freedom robot face and describe an in-progress human-robot interaction
study involving interruption during a realistic workplace scenario.
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