HRItk: The Human-Robot Interaction ToolKit Rapid Development of Speech-Centric Interactive Systems in ROS

Ian Lane, Vinay Prasad, Gaurav Sinha, Arlette Umuhoza, Shangyu Luo, Akshay Chandrashekaran, Antoine Raux

Abstract: Developing interactive robots is an extremely challenging task which requires a broad range of expertise across diverse disciplines, including, robotic planning, spoken language understanding, belief tracking and action management. While there has been a boom in recent years in the development of reusable components for robotic systems within common architectures, such as the Robot Operating System (ROS), little emphasis has been placed on developing components for Human-Robot-Interaction. In this paper we introduce HRItk (the Human-Robot-Interaction toolkit), a framework, consisting of messaging protocols, core-components, and development tools for rapidly building speech-centric interactive systems within the ROS environment. The proposed toolkit was specifically designed for extensibility, ease of use, and rapid development, allowing developers to quickly incorporate speech interaction into existing projects.