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

This paper describes a novel control architecture, B³IA, 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. B³IA 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 B³IA and present preliminary results from experiments that begin to experimentally test this hypothesis.