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118 Socially Intelligent Agentschild interactions [18]. Overall, results so far seem to indicate that a) the robotcan serve as an interesting and responsive interaction partner (which might beused in teaching social interaction skills), and b) that the robot can potentiallyserve as a social facilitator and a device that can be used to assess the communicationand social interaction competencies of children with autism. In orderto investigate robot-human interactions systematically, in the Aurora projecttwo analysis techniques have been developed and tested.2. Analysis of Interactions2.1 Methodological IssuesTrials are conducted at a room at Radlett Lodge School - the boarding schoolthat the children participating in the trial attend. This has many advantagessuch as familiar surroundings for the children and the availability of teacherswho know the children well. The fact that the children do not need to traveland that the trials inflict a minimum amount of disruption to lessons also helpsthe children to adapt to the change in schedule.The room used is approximately two meters by three meters, and is set asidefor us and so does not contain extra features or excess furniture. The roboticplatform used in this research is a Labo-1 robot. The robot is 30cm wide by40cm long and weighs 6.5kg. It is equipped with eight infrared sensors (fourat the front, two at the rear and one at either side), as well as a heat sensoron a swivel mount at the front of the robot. Using its sensors, the robot isable to avoid obstacles and follow a heat source such as a child. Additionally,a speech synthesiser unit can produce short spoken phrases using a neutralintonation. The robot is heavy enough to be difficult for the children to pickup and is robust enough to survive an average trial, including being pushedaround. The programming of the robot allows it to perform basic actions, suchas avoiding obstacles, following children and producing speech. The robotwill try to approach the child, respond vocally to his presence, and avoid otherobstacles - as well as not coming into actual contact with the child. All trials arevideotaped. In the following, the quantitative approach described in section 2.2analyses robot-human interactions in comparative trials. Section 2.3 introducesa qualitative approach that is applied to analyse the interactions of one childwith the robot and adults present during the trials.2.2 A Quantitative ApproachThe trials involve the child showing a wide variety of actions and responsesto situations. Unexpected actions are usually positive results and free expressionand full-body movements are encouraged. In order to examine the inter-