Multiple robots for psychiatric treatment

Abstract

Recent advances in robotics enable us to think of robot applications as a valuable communication partner in the clinical field of psychiatry. Although the potential usefulness of both android and desktop humanoid robots has been examined for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), these capabilities to keep talking has still been limited due to the immature technology causing inevitable errors in recognizing human utterances and intentions. Multi-party conversation using multiple robots has been proposed to conceal such errors and maintain conversation with humans. Meanwhile, this new technology is also expected to provide individuals with opportunities to easily observe the conversation between robots and allow them to skip responding to the robots. This paper reviews the basic concepts of robots and discusses these potential merits, namely (1) long lasting conversations and (2) objective viewpoints, which are caused by adopting multi-party conversation with multiple robots and should be fruitful for the treatment and education of individuals with ASD.