Applications of Robotics for Autism Spectrum Disorder: a Scoping Review

Robotic therapies are receiving growing interest in the autism field, especially for the improvement of social skills of children, enhancing traditional human interventions. In this work, we conduct a scoping review of the literature in robotics for autism, providing the largest review on this field from the last five years. Our work underlines the need to better characterize participants and to increase the sample size. It is also important to develop homogeneous training protocols to analyse and compare the results. Nevertheless, 7 out of the 10 Randomized control trials reported a significant impact of robotic therapy. Overall, robot autonomy, adaptability and personalization as well as more standardized outcome measures were pointed as the most critical issues to address in future research.