Dawn Robotics Forum

Hello Everyone,

I am Senior at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. My major is Entrepreneurial Studies and for my final assignment, I had to chose a high venture, high growth potential business. Specifically, I am interested in Robotics and Autism (I am mother to 2 children with autism).

Having looked at the current robots being used for autism on the market, Nao, Milo/Xeno, Kaspar these options are not affordable for an average family raising a child on the spectrum. My premise is if you can give people the technology tools they need at an affordable price, they will buy it. The iPad is a great example of a technology that is being used for special needs people that puts the power into the families hands (meaning I can go to the store and buy it and not fight with insurance companies or waiting lists for services).

I am posting to see if anyone can help me with some of my preliminary research because although I can do the business pieces of this process, I am not savvy on robotics or robotics software development. My idea, is a small robot (does not need to be humanoid like the existing robots mentioned above) that can prompt children with autism through their daily routines at home. For instance, in the morning it can act as an alarm to wake them up, practice some conversation (good morning, how are you) and remind the child what type of clothes to wear based on weather. I can also see things like, reminding the child when it is time to take medication or medical/therapy appointments, playing directional type games such as Simon Says.

My questions are probably very broad given my limited knowledge so I apologize:

1. Are we at a point with robotics that this idea is even realistic?

2. What are the costs to developing something like this? Where can costs be saved?

3. Who would make up a project team for developing something like this?

4. Is is possible to mass manufacture this once it is developed?

Any input is well appreciated. I really do see a time when robot assistants can be helpful and affordable tools for families like mine. Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

Regards,

AC

Dear AC,

Welcome to the forums. Your project sounds interesting. I've seen mention of robots like the Nao being used to help treat people with autism, but it's not something I'm very familiar with, so my answers will be high level at best.

1. As long as the interaction between the robot and the child are not too demanding, then what you propose should be possible. Basically, getting a robot to act as an alarm clock, no problem. Playing straightforward games like Simon Says should be straightforward too. Things that are unlikely to work would be if the conversation strayed from quite rigid areas. So a robot could say good morning, and respond to someone saying good morning to them, but wouldn't be able to respond sensibly if the conversation went into areas that it hadn't been programmed for. Basically, robots/AI are good at fairly concrete questions and answers (think Siri/ask Google) but aren't good at general conversation. It's also worth bearing in mind that it's very hard to get a robot to perceive the world in any meaningful way, so to detect the mood of the child for example.

2. Ummm, difficult to answer this one, depends what you want it to do. Developing hardware can be expensive as you may need to go through multiple iterations. When developing our robot kits, I personally have tried to save money by using off the shelf components, rather than developing everything from scratch. This means you can get up and running quickly, but may have to be making do with components which are not exactly perfect for what you want.

3. Again, depends on what the robot does but could be project manager, designer, child psychologist, educational psychologist, mechanical engineer, electronics engineer, software engineer, testers etc. Obviously, one person can wear multiple hats...

4. Of course, but you might need a fairly large market to get the product down to your target price. Manufactuing processes like injection moulding can make individual items very cheaply, but can have really high setup costs (i.e. £10,000+ for tooling) might be worth surveying some hardware kickstarter projects to get an idea of the manufacturing costs they're trying to cover.

Best of luck with this. Hopefully there'll be other people with relevant experience that can give you more advice. I'd recommend posting on other robot forums as well if you haven't already as we don't exactly have the highest traffic at the moment.

Good ones I know of are

Trossen Robotics
Robosavvy
Lets Make Robot's
Adafruit - not robotics but lots of makers with a good knowledge of hardware and software.

Regards

Alan

Alan, thank you for your response! Your answers have definitely given me further things to investigate.

Regards,

AC