Kaspar

Description
Kaspar is one of the later models of robots used in the AURORA project.  The AuRoRA Project studies if and how robots can become a "toy" that might serve an educational or therapeutic role for children with autism. The project is supported by the University of Hertfordshire.

The AuRoRA project continued its research of humanoid robots in 2005 with the creation of Kaspar. Kaspar is a child-sized robot which uses primarily bodily expressions (including movements of the head, hand, and arms), facial expressions, and gestures to interact with autistic children. Kaspar has a static body taken from a child-sized mannequin doll. Its torso, legs and hands do not move. Kaspar’s creators focused on the importance of the head and face design. They wanted to replicate some important facial features of humans without having an ultra-realistic appearance.

The Science Bit
In their 2009 study, Robins, Dautenhahn and Dickerson noted that Kaspar has the potential benefit of familiar human features (nose, eyes, mouth etc) whist being obviously non-human and that this may invite a direct physical engagement particularly touching and gaze. A variety of facial/head/gestural expressions allow a spectrum of social interaction and communicative/collaborative games.

The design approach used with Kaspar can be considered a hybrid approach as it is a humanoid-robot but makes every effort to keep simplified features. The study concludes that Kaspar is an example of a ‘bottom-up’ approach that should be considered in the future studies of this filed. It is an example of how (relatively) simple, low-budget, minimally expressive robots can facilitate interactive 'social' games that benefit autistic children. The specific needs of the children and the application environment were considered first and which then led to the use of an appropriate robot (i.e. Kaspar) that matches the needs in this application domain.