Many social robots deployed in public spaces hide hybrid cognitive architectures for dealing with daily tasks. Mostly, two main blocks sustain these hybrid architectures for robot behavior generation: deliberative and behavioral-based mechanisms. Robot Operating System offers different solutions for implementing these blocks, however, some issues arise when both are released in the robot. This paper presents a software engineering approach for normalizing the process of integrating them and presenting them as a fully cognitive architecture named MERLIN. Providing implementation details and diagrams for established the architecture, this research tests empirically the proposed solution using a variation from the challenge defined in the SciRoc @home competition. The results validate the usability of our approach and show MERLIN as a hybrid architecture ready for short and long-term tasks, showing better results than using a by default approach, particularly when it is deployed in highly interactive scenarios.

The use of people recognition techniques has become critical in some areas. For instance, social or assistive robots carry out collaborative tasks in the robotics field. A robot must know who to work with to deal with such tasks. Using biometric patterns may replace identification cards or codes on access control to critical infrastructures. The usage of Red Green Blue Depth (RGBD) cameras is ubiquitous to solve people recognition. However, this sensor has some constraints, such as they demand high computational capabilities, require the users to face the sensor, or do not regard users’ privacy. Furthermore, in the COVID-19 pandemic, masks hide a significant portion of the face. In this work, we present BRITTANY, a biometric recognition tool through gait analysis using Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). A Proof of Concept (PoC) has been carried out in an indoor environment with five users to evaluate BRITTANY. A new CNN architecture is presented, allowing the classification of aggregated occupancy maps that represent the people’s gait. This new architecture has been compared with LeNet-5 and AlexNet through the same datasets. The final system reports an accuracy of 88%.

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Understanding why a robot's behaviour was triggered is a growing concern to get human‐acceptable social robots. Every action, expected and unexpected, should be able to be explained and audited. The formal model proposed here deals with different information levels, from low‐level data, such as sensors' data logging; to high‐level data that provide an explanation of the robot's behaviour. This study examines the impact on the robot system of a custom log engine based on a custom ROS logging node and investigates pros and cons when used together with a NoSQL database locally and in a cloud environment. Results allow to characterize these alternatives and explore the best strategy for offering a fully log‐based accountability engine that maximizes the mapping between robot behaviour and robot logs.

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