Final meeting of the MigrAVE project takes place online

After three years of exciting work in the field of assistive robotics for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we have to wrap up the development and look back on what has been achieved. Throughout the project, we performed various small-scale studies with our QTrobot (a robot platform developed by LuxAI), which was our primary robot platform in MigrAVE. All of these are small highlights on their own, but the major highlight of the project was a field study which took place during this year's summer, where children with ASD interacted with the robot while performing learning programs that were specifically developed for this study. The study clearly demonstrated the potential of assistive robots in this domain, but also highlighted various technological challenges that need to be resolved so that children can fully benefit from the robot. We believe that the results of MigrAVE form a good foundation for future developments and look forward to opportunities to continue this work in future studies.

While the project is ending, many of its outcomes will remain available:

• Several papers detailing some of our results in the project have already been published (all of them can be found on our publications page); a few more are still in preparation.
• The software developed in the project is available through our GitHub organisation.
• All videos produced during the project can be found on the project's YouTube channel.
• An info portal about ASD that was developed by our project partners will also remain online; the portal can be found at https://migrave.de/.

We would like to thank Mohammad Wasil for being part of the team until mid-2022, our research assistant Natalia Quiroga for the hard work throughout the project, as well as our students Hasnainali Walli and Vivek Mannava, both of whom made important contributions to the developments in the project.

We would finally like to thank our partners, Münster University of Applied Sciences and RFH Köln University of Applied Sciences, for the very constructive cooperation in the project.