A Reference Software Architecture for Social Robots

TL;DR

This paper proposes a set of principles and a reference software architecture to facilitate rapid development, customization, and personalization of social robots, addressing key design challenges like trust, interoperability, and reusability.

Contribution

It introduces a reference software architecture for social robots based on principles derived from the MARIO project, promoting component reuse and rapid development.

Findings

Established foundational principles for social robot architecture.

Designed a reference architecture to improve reusability and customization.

Facilitated rapid development of social robotic solutions.

Abstract

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes difficult to rapidly develop, customise, and personalise robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for the design of a reference software architecture for Social Robots. The ultimate goal of this work is to establish a common ground based on a reference software architecture to allow to easily reuse robotic software components in order to rapidly develop, implement, and personalise Social Robots.