Take the Dog to the Park: Quadruped Robot for Joint Attention Training with Autistic Children in Naturalistic Settings

Robot-supported interventions for joint attention (JA) in autistic children have shown encouraging outcomes, yet most remain confined to stationary robots in indoor settings, limiting opportunities for skill generalization and broader developmental benefits. We introduce an intervention that employs a quadruped robot dog as a peer-like partner for JA training across both indoor and outdoor environments. In this intervention, the robot dog directs children’s attention to distributed targets in the environment and initiates JA trials. A four-week pre-post exploratory study with six autistic children demonstrated improvements in JA performance and indications of transfer to daily social communication. Spontaneous behaviors such as motor imitation (crawling) and novel social interactions with the robot also emerged, suggesting potential for broader developmental gains. These findings provide initial evidence for the efficacy of mobile robot-supported JA interventions in naturalistic contexts and offer implications for future design.