Frano Petric attended the 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2017) held in Lisbon, Portugal, on 28 to 31 August 2017, where he presented a paper titled “Functional Imitation Tasks in the Context of Robot-assisted Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnostics: Preliminary Investigations”. In this paper, instead of pure motoric imitation, imitation tasks involving real objects in the environment are proposed. The introduction of physical objects strongly emphasizes joint attention skills, another area that is typically impaired in children with ASD. Furthermore, simple object detection, manipulation, tracking and gesture recognition algorithms, suitable for real-time, onboard execution on the small-scale humanoid robot NAO were presented.