Imagine a 5-year-old boy: dark hair, baseball-cap, jeans and t-shirt; sitting on a bench playing away with a toy drum. You notice something, his movements – they seem a little quirky, and when you step nearer, you realise – it’s not a boy. It’s a robot!
Provided with a simple set of movements, the robot KASPAR can help children with autism in interacting with other people. © University of Hertfordshire
When you think of robots today, there are two things that come to mind: huge robotic machines cracking away like clockwork and, at the end of the production belt, there emerges a car or a microwave. Then there are the incredible, perhaps spine-chilling, human-like robots from the realm of science fiction, the likes of Robocop or Terminator. But that is fiction, and the world we live in has a long way to go, with sophisticated machinery with programmed human like intelligence still being the stuff of fascination. Or so one might think!
However, there are already robots which are able to interact with human beings – even though only in a limited way. The Adaptive System Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire has developed a robotic system called KASPAR (Kinesics And Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robotics) designed to have minimal social interaction capabilities. KASPAR is currently being used by a team of doctors to aid with the therapy of children suffering from autism.
Autistic children often have problems with reading another person’s emotions, and the researchers thought the simple android, able to express basic emotions like smiling, could help autistic children learn to interact with other people. When they work with KASPAR, the children learn to understand these emotions and how to react to them. Even more importantly, children playing with KASPAR do not only interact with the robot, but also with the people around them – they want to share this experience and it encourages them to open up to others.
Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, one of the researches on the KASPAR project, points out that the work with KASPAR can indeed help children, but should be used as an additional therapy to run alongside other treatments, rather than as a replacement, as not every child will respond to KASPAR. Or as Prof Dautenhahn describes it: “There are no breakthroughs with autism.”
The biggest challenge for the future use of robots in therapies is the problem of batteries. It may sound like a trivial problem, but with the present capacities, the batteries of KASPAR and other androids often last for only one or two hours. In addition, the battery is often the heaviest part of the robot and therefore limits its movements. Prof Dautenhahn says that she and her team are waiting for new batteries to be developed. This could be a big improvement for their work with KASPAR and autistic children. But until then, KASPAR will probably need to visit the power outlet time and time again before he can play on his little drum.
Awesome, Anka. Really good write-up this, and superb to know that robots aren't just being used to wage war on one another, such as at the end of the film Small Soldiers!
'McGuinness