This paper presents a robotic platform suitable for Human-Robot Interactions (HRI), with focus on verbal interactions. It is obvious that interactive and social skills are two indispensable requirements in many application areas where robots and humans need to interact with each other. Consequently, we have developed a cognitive robot companion, i.e. a parrot like robot, with main focus on verbal interaction with humans. A possible educational or therapeutic aspects of this robot for children who suffer from Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been considered. In other words the robot is designed intended to comfort and emotionally interact with autistic children. Different types of functionalities are introduced and discussed in the light of their potential investigation in humanrobot experiments. The platform is intended for research in otherHRI applications, such as concept learning and robotainment. The initial results show the attractiveness of the designed robot for humans and its great potential for success in using this platform for rehabilitation in social interaction, edutainment and entertainment.

The majority of children with autism face difficulties in social interaction and communication skills. Consequently, in this paper we present a pilot study in which we explored the usability of Sphero as a rehabilitation tool for developing social and communication skills. We designed an interactive scenario where children with autism should verbally control the robot and utter voice commands. Our observations show that the children were very interested to interact with the robot in the given framework. They showed surprising behaviors that are promising evidences of effectiveness of using Sphero in rehabilitation of social and communication deficits.

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21st century brought along a considerable decrease in social interactions, due to the newly emerged lifestyle around the world, which became more noticeable recently of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, children with autism spectrum disorder have further complications regarding their social interactions with other humans. In this paper, a fully Robotic Social Environment (RSE), designed to simulate the needed social environment for children, especially those with autism is described. An RSE can be used to simulate many social situations, such as affective interpersonal interactions, in which observational learning can take place. In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed RSE, it has been tested on a group of children with autism, who had difficulties in emotion recognition, which in turn, can influence social interaction. An A-B-A single case study was designed to show how RSE can help children with autism recognize four basic facial expressions, i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, through observing the social interactions of two robots speaking about these facial expressions. The results showed that the emotion recognition skills of the participating children were improved. Furthermore, the results showed that the children could maintain and generalize their emotion recognition skills after the intervention period. In conclusion, the study shows that the proposed RSE, along with other rehabilitation methods, can be effective in improving the emotion recognition skills of children with autism and preparing them to enter human social environments.

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