Composing HARMONI: An Open-source Tool for Human and Robot Modular OpeN Interaction

The research and development of socially interactive robots is a complex challenge because of the wide variety of capabilities needed for effective social human-robot interactions (HRI). Many of these capabilities, including perception, dialog, and control, have state of the art methods and solutions, but combining those into a comprehensive and seamless interaction is still an open challenge. We describe HARMONI, a multi-modal, open-source tool for rapid social HRI development and deployment. HARMONI is centered around a ROS package for interaction development, including decision management and node orchestration. HARMONI systematically integrates with disparate functionalities needed to conduct a meaningful social human-robot interaction such as external cloud services, AI models, and modules for sensing, planning, and acting on a variety of platforms. HARMONI was applied to the QT robot platform and usability tests were conducted to evaluate the ease and speed of development and deployment. This paper describes the architecture and design of HARMONI and reports the results of a pilot study with novice users.