ROS for Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This paper proposes standard ROS-based interfaces for human-robot interaction to improve interoperability and reusability of social perception tools across diverse HRI applications.

Contribution

It introduces a set of conventions and interfaces for HRI scenarios within ROS, facilitating integration of social perception components.

Findings

Developed a reference pipeline implementation for HRI scenarios.

Promotes interoperability of social perception tools in ROS.

Applicable to various HRI applications from crowd simulation to human kinematics.

Abstract

Integrating real-time, complex social signal processing into robotic systems -- especially in real-world, multi-party interaction situations -- is a challenge faced by many in the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) community. The difficulty is compounded by the lack of any standard model for human representation that would facilitate the development and interoperability of social perception components and pipelines. We introduce in this paper a set of conventions and standard interfaces for HRI scenarios, designed to be used with the Robot Operating System (ROS). It directly aims at promoting interoperability and re-usability of core functionality between the many HRI-related software tools, from skeleton tracking, to face recognition, to natural language processing. Importantly, these interfaces are designed to be relevant to a broad range of HRI applications, from high-level crowd simulation, to group-level social interaction modelling, to detailed modelling of human kinematics. We demonstrate these interface by providing a reference pipeline implementation, packaged to be easily downloaded and evaluated by the community.