B3IA: A control architecture for autonomous robot-assisted behavior intervention for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

This paper describes a novel control architecture, B(3)IA, designed to address the challenges of developing autonomous robot systems for use as behavior intervention tools for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Our goal is to create a system that can be easily adapted for use by non-roboticists engaged in ASD therapy. B(3)IA is a behavior-based architecture for control of socially assistive robots using human-robot interaction in the ASD context. We hypothesize that the organization of a robot control architecture is important to the success of a robot-assisted intervention, because the success of such intervention hinges on the behavior of the robot We detail the organization of B(3)IA and present preliminary results from experiments that begin to experimentally test this hypothesis.