Hands-on: From Zero to an Interactive Social Robot Using ROS4HRI and LLMs

This tutorial aims at providing an up-to-date picture of the state-of-art regarding using the Robot Operating System (ROS) to build robots with socio-cognitive capabilities. The tutorial will briefly introduce the ROS4HRI framework, and show how it can be used to build a complete social robot architecture, from human perception to expressive social interaction. We will illustrate the full software integration required to implement an autonomous social robot using a combination of open-source ROS-based social perception modules, a semantic knowledge base, a Large Language Model (LLM), and multi-modal expressiveness. Participants will be able to follow along using a simple social interaction simulator, as well as their own webcams. The organisers will also provide a new PAL Robotics TIAGo Pro stand-alone head to demonstrate the same system running on actual hardware.