I started with a previous paper from the course resources about Puffy the social robot that helps kids with NDD.1 It’s still new so I went to the references and found a paper about huggable robots in multi-modal spaces.2 I was curious about why robots help at all and then found a paper in the references section for why social robots help with therapy for kids on the autism spectrum.3
Root Paper:
[1] Degiorgi, Marzia & Garzotto, Franca & Gelsomini, Mirko & Leonardi, Giulia & Penati, Simone & Ramuzat, Noëlie & Silvestri, Jacopo & Clasadonte, Francesco & Kinoe, Yosuke. (2017). Puffy — An inflatable robotic companion for pre-schoolers. 35-41. 10.1109/ROMAN.2017.8172277.
Related papers:
[2] Bonarini, Andrea & Garzotto, Franca & Gelsomini, Mirko & Clasadonte, Francesco & Romero, Maximiliano. (2016). A Huggable, Mobile Robot for Developmental Disorder Interventions in a Multi-Modal Interaction Space. 10.1109/ROMAN.2016.7745214.
[3] Cabibihan, John-John & Javed, Hifza & Jr, Marcelo & Aljunied, Sharifah. (2013). Why Robots? A Survey on the Roles and Benefits of Social Robots in the Therapy of Children with Autism. International Journal of Social Robotics. 5. 10.1007/s12369-013-0202-2.