Open-source Natural Language Processing on the PAL Robotics ARI Social Robot

We demonstrate how state-of-art open-source tools for automatic speech recognition (vosk) and dialogue management (rasa) can be integrated on a social robotic platform (PAL Robotics' ARI robot) to provide rich verbal interactions. Our open-source, ROS-based pipeline implements the ROS4HRI standard, and the demonstration specifically presents the details of the integration, in a way that will enable attendees to replicate it on their robots. The demonstration takes place in the context of assistive robotics and robots for elderly care, two application domains with unique interaction challenges, for which, the ARI robot has been designed and extensively tested in real-world settings.