Abstract:

Technology plays a key role in today's society in transforming several sectors, including education. In this sense, robotics is beginning to be used as an innovative tool to work in school environments. This is due to the fact that it allows the development of autonomy, communication and social interaction skills. In this regard, the use of this tool is adjusted to a type of student that is increasingly present in the classroom, the autistic student. Thus, the aim of the research is to conduct an analysis of the use of robotics to work with autistic students using the database of the web of Science core collection, in the period 2019-2024. Search words were chosen from ERIC's Thesaurus. These words were: autism, autism spectrum disorder, autism spectrum disorders, high-functioning autism, low-functioning autism and Asperger's. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the final sample was 351 documents. The most important results show that the United States is the largest producer of publications with 82 of the papers. Likewise, the most prolific period was 2020 with 89 publications, with robotics and computer science being the most present areas of the Web of Science. Finally, the most published document types are articles and proceeding papers. As future lines, the possibility of extending the period of analysis and adding other databases is considered.

The authors acknowledge the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
This article was funded by the Programa Estatal de I + D + i Orientado a los Retos de la Sociedad del Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación Español (No: PID2023-149706OB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and the Agencia Estatal de la Investigación. The title of the project is “Design and application of a personalised and inclusive learning tool using artificial intelligence for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder”

Acknowledgement:
One of the authors has received the grant PREP2023-001689 with FPI predoctoral contract associated to the project PID2023-149706OB-I00.

Keywords:

Robotics, education, autism, social assistive robot, bibliometrics.