  Developing socially competent robots requires tight integration of robotics,
computer vision, speech processing, and web technologies. We present the
Socially-interactive Robot Software platform (SROS), an open-source framework
addressing this need through a modular layered architecture. SROS bridges the
Robot Operating System (ROS) layer for mobility with web and Android interface
layers using standard messaging and APIs. Specialized perceptual and
interactive skills are implemented as ROS services for reusable deployment on
any robot. This facilitates rapid prototyping of collaborative behaviors that
synchronize perception with physical actuation. We experimentally validated
core SROS technologies including computer vision, speech processing, and GPT2
autocomplete speech implemented as plug-and-play ROS services. Modularity is
demonstrated through the successful integration of an additional ROS package,
without changes to hardware or software platforms. The capabilities enabled
confirm SROS's effectiveness in developing socially interactive robots through
synchronized cross-domain interaction. Through demonstrations showing
synchronized multimodal behaviors on an example platform, we illustrate how the
SROS architectural approach addresses shortcomings of previous work by lowering
barriers for researchers to advance the state-of-the-art in adaptive,
collaborative customizable human-robot systems through novel applications
integrating perceptual and social abilities.
