Abstract:

Nowadays, technology is more and more present in the activities that are developed in daily life. Therefore, there are more and more areas of knowledge where its use is encouraged. More specifically, robotics in education promotes student motivation and provides easier real learning situations. This favors autistic students. For this reason, the objective of the research is the application of robotics for the improvement of receptive communication in autistic students. With this objective, 11 sessions were carried out with the NAO robot to work on social skills with 4 autistic students over a period of two months. The Denver questionnaire was used as a measurement tool, which was filled out before and after the intervention by the researchers. The results showed that subject 3 was the one who showed improvement in the greatest number of items, being 2, 4, 9, 10, 11. In all the items indicated, the increase was 20%. Subject 2 also showed improvement in item 1, which refers to the student's ability to locate sounds by turning towards the source. On the other hand, neither subject 1 nor subject 4 have experienced improvements due to the robotics work in receptive communication. As future lines of work, the possibility of expanding the sample used and being able to apply teleoperation techniques so that the NAO robot can be used by researchers/teachers with mobile devices from any location is proposed.

Acknowledgement:
This article was supported by the Programa Estatal de I+D+i Orientado a los Retos de la Sociedad del Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación Español. PID2020-112611RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the Agencia Estatal de la Investigación.

Keywords:

Robotics, Autism, intervention, research.