Abstract:

Social Service robots can be very helpful inside educational and research campuses and can help and improve the quality of learning for students as well as their on-site campus experience.

Service robots developers use specific components at an early stage of product development without following a predetermined internal architectural model that integrate all of these components in order to provide different services. Therefore, there is an urgent need to design an automated system architecture based on engineering methods and to present it with UML.

In this paper, we propose a preliminary prototype for a component-based system architecture for a service robot. Hybrid Component-based Model Architecture (HCMA) is presented as a mix between component-based, organizational multi-agent and hybrid architectures. From a technical point of view, we describe the capabilities of a cognitive service robot that is used in educational institutions and campuses, and explain the shortcomings of an existing system for a humanoid robot (Pepper) that is controlled by a planning module which is responsible for creating, decomposing and executing tasks according to pre-programmed behaviors with predefined priorities. The proposed architecture integrates a fully planning and reasoning system with the existing robotic system, using symbolic AI planner (ROSPlan) that creates generic plans, and a task component module that organizes the execution of concurrent tasks. We further discuss several components such as learning module and present the benefits of parallel computation using cloud.

Our primary goal is to propose a system architecture which provides a paradigm that can be followed for designing different cognitive robotic systems that used ROS (Robotic Operating system) as the messaging framework.

A use case scenario is presented, which proposes the social interaction mechanism between assistive robot in universities and students in the classroom.

Keywords:

Social Service robots, e-learning, ROS, assistive robot, software engineer, system architecture.