Robot and Human Interactive Communication

This paper studies the eflect of a robot’s design (ap-pearance) in facilitating and encouraging interaction of children with aut ism with a small humanoid robot. The paper compares the children’s level of interaction with and response t o the robot in two different sce-narios: one where the robot was dressed like a hu-m a n (with a ‘pretty-girl ’ appearance) with a n uncov-ered face, and the other when at appeared with plain clothing and with a featureless, masked face. The re-sults of these trials clearly indicate the children’s pref-erence in their initial response f o r interaction with a plain, featureless robot over interaction with a human like robot.