Robot intervention in social skills of children with autism: a review of the latest three years *

Regarding the social skills barriers in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), robots can be used as an effective therapeutic tool and can intervene in different areas of children’s development, such as attention levels and emotional cognition. This article aims to review the role of robots in the rehabilitation of social skills in children with ASD, and provide reference for future research directions for researchers. This article analyzed 29 studies from the Web of Science and ScienceDirect databases over the past three years (2020-2023), and discussed the intervention content, intervention effects, robot categories, and technologies combined with robots. The results indicated that social robots participating in this research over the past three years can be classified into humanoid, animal-shaped, and toy-shaped based on their appearance, and can intervene in children’s social skills, such as attention, action, emotional cognition, and other social skills, with mostly positive intervention effects. In addition, they can be combined with technologies such as electroencephalogram to better observe the intervention effects.