We are working on a paper about autism and we have chosen a robotic dog as a possible solution. Because the autistic don't know how to socialize appropriately, we need to incorporate the dogs ability to have human-to-human interaction to teach correct social skills. How would we do this?

I don'd know how you could do that. Animals have been proven to help autistic children because they teach them how to have empathy (one theroy is that since animals can't communicate, they feel on the same level, but at the same time, animals need you to be gentle and pet them nicely and stuff). A movie that shows that is "After Thomas".

There are already human simulation computer programs for autism, that help autistic people have a conversation with a human that isn't really a human. Those are actually quite good.

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The robotic dog idea though kind of takes away all the good things about being an animal because the whole thing about animals is that they ARE real. So, as a person a person who works with autistic people, I would have to say that would probably not be the best idea.

However, I suppose, there are quite a lot of autistic people that are afraid of animals, and perhaps this robotic dog of yours could teach them slowly about what animals do and stuff, and could help them be less afraid, and then they could upgrade to a real dog. That's the only thing I can think of.

How can a dog have human-human interaction? Couldn't it only have dog-human interaction? If you make a robot dog behave like a human, wouldn't that just confuse an autistic person? I think your intentions are good, but perhaps that's not how you should approach the problem. Maybe make a humanoid robot? Then it could just behave like a human without the confusing aspect of a dog.