KASPAR is—-not the friendly ghost; not a mysterious boy found in 19th century Germany with a mysterious story (who is sometimes described in the context of feral children)—but a child-sized humanoid robot developed by the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire. (KASPAR stands for “Kinesics and Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robotics.”) As noted in the weblog of the American Association for Technology in Psychiatry, KASPAR is being developed as part of the European Robot Cup Project with the intent to “build an open-source robot platform for cognitive development research. The Adaptive Systems Research Group is investigating the use of gestures, expressions, synchronisation and imitation.” The plan is also to use KASPAR for developmental studies and to try him in interactive games.

KASPAR is meant to look like a little boy and is able to make minimal facial expressions and to move his arms and legs, and will be tested in school systems in the Hertfordshire region of the UK.

From the KASPAR website:

clipped from kaspar.feis.herts.ac.uk

This family of robots have been used in the past in the Aurora project which investigated the possible use of robotic systems as therapeutic or educational tools to encourage social interaction skills in children with Autism. They are currently being used also in our investigations with children with autism, part of the European IROMEC project , which acknowledges the important role of play in child development as a crucial vehicle for learning about the physical and social environment, the self, and for developing social relationships. IROMEC targets children who are prevented from playing, either due to cognitive, developmental or physical impairments which affect their playing skills, and is investigating how robotic toys can empower children with disabilities to discover the range of play styles from solitary to social and cooperative play.

And, you can watch a video of KASPAR moving his neck, mouth, and eyelids and “interacting” with a teddy bear here. Shades of the movie A.I., perhaps?

• Can androids shine light into the murky world of autism and enable scientists to treat it and other psychiatric disorders?
• What can mechanical beings reveal about how we relate to one another as flesh-and-blood creations?
• And as these humanlike stand-ins continue to evolve, will they form relationships with us and lay claim to certain moral and legal rights?

You can read all about it in a special issue of Connection Science (December, Vol 18, No 4), co-edited by Karl MacDorman, associate professor at the School of Informatics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka University. MacDorman is “among a handful of experts in the emerging field of android science, a cross-disciplinary approach to test and, if possible, verify hypotheses about human interaction,” as noted in today’s LaboratoryTalk.com.

I have long been leery of the computer or robot metaphor of autistic persons, though very curious about Prof. MacDorman’s and Prof. Ishiguro’s findings. Charlie is both the most predicatable of boys (his fear of dogs) and the least predictable, his likes and dislikes not to be expressed by any algorithm, axiom, theorem or theory—life raising an autistic child is often a surprise, and always a gift of incalculable value.

What if someone built an autistic android……

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