  In this paper we present our work with the Pepper robot, a service robot from
SoftBank Robotics. We had two main goals in this work: improving the autonomy
of this robot by increasing its awareness of the environment; and enhance the
robot ability to interact with its users. To achieve this goals, we used ROS, a
modern open-source framework for developing robotics software, to provide
Pepper with state of the art localization and navigation capabilities.
Furthermore, we contribute an architecture for effective human interaction
based on cloud services. Our architecture improves Pepper speech recognition
capabilities by connecting it to the IBM Bluemix Speech Recognition service and
enable the robot to recognize its user via an in-house face recognition
web-service. We show examples of our successful integration of ROS and IBM
services with Pepper's own software. As a result, we were able to make Pepper
move autonomously in a environment with humans and obstacles. We were also able
to have Pepper execute spoken commands from known users as well as newly
introduced users that were enrolled in the robot list of trusted users via a
multi-modal interface.
