A wearable sensor vest for social humanoid robots with GPGPU, IoT, and modular software architecture

Abstract

Currently, most social robots interact with their surroundings and humans through sensors that are integral parts of the robots, which limits the usability of the sensors, human–robot interaction, and interchangeability. A wearable sensor garment that fits many robots is needed in many applications. This article presents an affordable wearable sensor vest, and an open-source software architecture with the Internet of Things (IoT) for social humanoid robots. The vest consists of touch, temperature, gesture, distance, vision sensors, and a wireless communication module. The IoT feature allows the robot to interact with humans locally and over the Internet. The designed architecture works for any social robot that has a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU), I2C/SPI buses, Internet connection, and the Robotics Operating System (ROS). The modular design of this architecture enables developers to easily add/remove/update complex behaviors. The proposed software architecture provides IoT technology, GPGPU nodes, I2C and SPI bus mangers, audio-visual interaction nodes (speech to text, text to speech, and image understanding), and isolation between behavior nodes and other nodes. The proposed IoT solution consists of related nodes in the robot, a RESTful web service, and user interfaces. We used the HTTP protocol as a means of two-way communication with the social robot over the Internet. Developers can easily edit or add nodes in C, C++, and Python programming languages. Our architecture can be used for designing more sophisticated behaviors for social humanoid robots.