LARa: A Robotic Framework for Human-Robot Interaction on Indoor Environments

Human-robot interaction has received increasing attention in the last decades, since robots may act as both helpers and companions for the elderly and impaired people, which is particularly important for an aging population. Robot platforms for this aim may rely on data provided by several different sensors, in order to act effectively and provide natural and engaging interactions. In this paper, we present the LARa framework, comprised by a robot and a software library. Several relevant behaviors have been provided and encapsulated, such as robot face, speech interaction, recognition of faces, facial expressions and objects, and robot navigation. A control architecture was built, in order to integrate these modules into a functional robotic system. The developed framework may serve as a stating point for other research regarding robots in indoor environments. Results obtained within the scope of each module show a good performance of the proposed control architecture.