Use of Workspaces and Proxemics to Control Interaction Between Robot and Children with ASD

Proxemics is a theory of non-verbal communication that explains how people perceive and use space to achieve communication goals. This work shows a proposal to use concepts of proxemics associated with a control law to a socially assistive robot to operate as close as possible of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in therapies. A set of software libraries and tools named Robotic Operating System (ROS) is used to make this project reusable. The analysis of asymptotic stability of the system is presented here, and the control law is tested in simulation. Results show that the proposed control law worked as expected, with the robot interacting with the child along the space, following the concepts of proxemics implemented by a finite state machine.