Cute and soft

Robots might be helpful in light of the increasing number of children diagnosed with autism. Before we test the robots with children with autism, we first describe our first steps in investigating the effectiveness of robots as they interact with normally developing children. In this paper, we used a humanoid robot to tell a social story to introduce basic skills on social interaction. We developed a social story on "Greeting Others" and pilot-tested it on a normally developing 5-year old girl. We report a few of the qualitative findings that we found during the interaction of the robot and the child to provide fundamental design guidelines for future design of robots that interact with children and possibly for children with autism as well.