A Social Robot Architecture for Personalized Real-Time Human–Robot Interaction

In the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), the combination of robotics and artificial intelligence has paved the way for the development of social robots able to undertake realistic conversations with humans, making them the perfect human interface in applications like for instance, robotic house assistants and hotel concierges. Despite the several solutions developed in recent years, the definition of social robot requirements and the software modules needed to meet such requirements has not yet been formalized. In this article, we define the requirements of a social robot and propose a software architecture that includes all the necessary modules to meet them. The proposed architecture, implemented using robot operating system (ROS) nodes, is hardware-independent, enabling its reuse across different robotic platforms with interchangeable types of sensors and actuators. We deployed a social robot based on this architecture to interact with attendees of a real exhibition context and validated the reliability of our proposed solution through a survey of 161 users. The results of the user study indicated a high-quality user experience with the social robot, with scores ranging from 4 to 5 (being 5 the maximum score). Sharing these design choices and evaluation results could significantly benefit the development of future social robotics applications in the context of IoT.