Lehigh Instrument for Learning Interaction (LILI): An Interactive Robot to Aid Development of Social Skills for Autistic Children

Recent studies show that autistic children tend to speak and interact more in the presence of an interactive robot. Unfortunately, most of the robotic experiments were conducted in highly controlled clinical settings or limited selected home environments due to the high deployment cost. In this paper, we design a low-cost interactive robot that can be readily deployed to home environments. Our robot, called Lehigh Instrument for Learning Interaction (LILI), interacts with users via gestures, voice commands, and an animated speaking avatar. LILI can recognize users' faces, and her motion can be controlled either via gesture or voice. We describe both the system and software architectures of LILI. Experimental results are also presented.