A Reference Software Architecture for Social Robots

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 timeintensive 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