  Currently, most social robots interact with their surroundings and humans
through sensors that are integral parts of the robots, which limits the
usability of the sensors, human-robot interaction, and interchangeability. A
wearable sensor garment that fits many robots is needed in many applications.
This article presents an affordable wearable sensor vest, and an open-source
software architecture with the Internet of Things (IoT) for social humanoid
robots. The vest consists of touch, temperature, gesture, distance, vision
sensors, and a wireless communication module. The IoT feature allows the robot
to interact with humans locally and over the Internet. The designed
architecture works for any social robot that has a general-purpose graphics
processing unit (GPGPU), I2C/SPI buses, Internet connection, and the Robotics
Operating System (ROS). The modular design of this architecture enables
developers to easily add/remove/update complex behaviors. The proposed software
architecture provides IoT technology, GPGPU nodes, I2C and SPI bus mangers,
audio-visual interaction nodes (speech to text, text to speech, and image
understanding), and isolation between behavior nodes and other nodes. The
proposed IoT solution consists of related nodes in the robot, a RESTful web
service, and user interfaces. We used the HTTP protocol as a means of two-way
communication with the social robot over the Internet. Developers can easily
edit or add nodes in C, C++, and Python programming languages. Our architecture
can be used for designing more sophisticated behaviors for social humanoid
robots.
