ROS for Human-Robot Interaction

ROS for Human-Robot Interaction (or ROS4HRI) is an umbrella for all the ROS packages, conventions and tools that help developing interactive robots with ROS.

ROS4HRI conventions

The ROS REP-155 (aka, ROS4HRI) defines a set of topics, naming conventions, frames that are important for HRI application. It was originally introduced in the paper 'ROS for Human-Robot Interaction', presented at IROS2021.

The REP-155 is still evolving. On-going changes can be submitted and discussed on the ros-infrastructure/rep Github repository.

Common ROS packages

• hri_msgs (available in noetic and humble): base ROS messages for Human-Robot Interaction

• human_description (available in noetic and humble): a parametric kinematic model of a human, in URDF format

• libhri (available in noetic and humble): a C++ library to easily access human-related topics

• pyhri (available in noetic and humble): a Python library to easily access human-related topics

• hri_rviz (available in noetic, source supports ROS 2): a collection of RViz plugins to visualise faces, facial landmarks, 3D kinematic models...

These packages are all available in ROS noetic (eg, the ros-noetic-hri-msgs debian package).

The source code for these packages (as well as several others) can be found on github.com/ros4hri.

Specialized ROS packages

Feel free to add your own packages to this list, as long as they implement the REP-155.

Face detection, recognition, analysis

• hri_face_detect (ROS1 & ROS2): a Google MediaPipe-based multi-people face detector.

  • Supports:
  • facial landmarks
  • 3D head pose estimation
  • 30+ FPS on CPU only

Body tracking, gesture recognition

• hri_fullbody (ROS1 & ROS2): a Google MediaPipe-based 3D full-body pose estimator

  • Supports:
  • 2D and 3D pose estimation of a single person (multiple person pose estimation possible with an external body detector)
  • facial landmarks
  • optionally, can use registered depth information to improve 3D pose estimation

Voice processing, speech, dialogue understanding

Whole person analysis

• hri_person_manager (ROS1 & ROS2): probabilistic fusion of faces, bodies, voices into unified persons.

Group interactions, gaze behaviour

Tutorials

You can access the ROS4HRI tutorials here.