The design and development of robotic agents to be deployed in the real world for human-robot interaction (HRI) purpose require adequate robot architecture. In this paper, we present a new, middle-out robot architecture which extends the reactive paradigm by adding an interactive layer, leading to the Sense-Act-Modulated-by-Interactions (SAMI) architecture. This proposed SAMI robot architecture has been embodied by a mobile, multi-modal, SAMI-based robot and successfully validated by carrying out tests of the SAMI embodiment in real-world, unstructured environment.