Upgrading Pepper Robot s Social Interaction with Advanced Hardware and Perception Enhancements

In this paper, we propose hardware and software enhancements for the Pepper robot to improve its human-robot interaction capabilities. This includes the integration of an NVIDIA Jetson GPU to enhance computational capabilities and execute real time algorithms, and a RealSense D435i camera to capture depth images, as well as the computer vision algorithms to detect and localize the humans around the robot and estimate their body orientation and gaze direction. The new stack is implemented on ROS and is running on the extended Pepper hardware, and the communication with the robot s firmware is done through the NAOqi ROS driver API. We have also collected a MoCap dataset of human activities in a controlled environment, together with the corresponding RGB-D data, to validate the proposed perception algorithms.