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International audience; We design a personalized human-robot environment for social learning for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In order to define an individual�s profile, we posit that the individual�s reliance on proprioceptive and kinematic visual cues should affect the way the individual suffering from ASD interacts with a social agent (human/robot/virtual agent). In this paper, we assess the potential link between recognition performances of body/facial expressions of emotion of increasing complexity, emotion recognition on platforms with different visual features (two mini-humanoid robots, a virtual agent, and a human), and proprioceptive and visual cues integration of an individual. First, we describe the design of the EMBODI-EMO database containing videos of controlled body/facial expressions of emotions from various platforms. We explain how we validated this database with typically developed (TD) individuals. Then, we investigate the relationship between emotion recognition and proprioceptive and visual profiles of TD individuals and individuals with ASD. For TD individuals, our results indicate a relationship between profiles and emotion recognition. As expected, we show that TD individuals that rely more heavily on visual cues yield better recognition scores. However, we found that TD individuals relying on proprioception have better recognition scores, going against our hypothesis. Finally, participants with ASD relying more heavily on proprioceptive cues have lower emotion recognition scores on all conditions than participants relying on visual cues.

Welcome to the Autonomous Robots special issue on the emerging area of Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR). What is SAR? Socially assistive robotics focuses on providing assistance through social rather than physical interaction between the robot and the human user. SAR has the potential to enhance human quality of life for large user populations, including the elderly, people with physical impairments, those involved in rehabilitation therapy (e.g., post-stroke patients), and people with cognitive disabilities and social and developmental disorders (e.g., children with autism spectrum disorder, children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD)). Socially assistive robotics has a great variety of potential uses and associated multi-faceted research and usability challenges. Numerous interesting questions and issues need to be addressed as we aim toward including robust, reliable, user-friendly, empathetic, and encouraging robots in our daily lives. Those questions include: “What are the circumstances in which people (especially those with special needs) accept an assistive robot in their environment?” “What modes of communication should the robot employ?” “What is the role of the robot’s physical embodiment?” “How to integrate the a priori knowledge about the users into the robot system?” “How can the human-robot interaction design ensure safety?” and “How are friendly, familiar, usable, and effective interaction models with a robot to be designed?”