  This paper presents an exploratory study designed for children with Autism
Spectrum Disorders (ASD) that investigates children's awareness of being
imitated by a robot in a play/game scenario. The Nao robot imitates all the arm
movement behaviors of the child in real-time in dyadic and triadic
interactions. Different behavioral criteria (i.e., eye gaze, gaze shifting,
initiation and imitation of arm movements, smile/laughter) were analyzed based
on the video data of the interaction. The results confirm only parts of the
research hypothesis. However, these results are promising for the future
directions of this work.
