Human-robot interaction (HRI) programmers often struggle with operating older robot hardware due to the short support period provided by manufacturers and difficulties integrating modern software solutions. This paper introduces the ZTL Task Library (ZTL), a lightweight communication framework and protocol designed to decouple robot hardware from the operating platform via socket communication, thereby increasing robot lifetime. We present a task-based communication protocol facilitating the co-design of robot behaviours with non-programming experts. Our approach has been shown across different platforms to effectively mitigate incompatibilities between middlewares, simplifying control and usability, allowing for simultaneous addressing of multiple devices.

We present a web application for controlling NAO V5 and NAO V6 robots using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). The application was designed for a study in a special school. The school staff have found the application easy-to-use and versatile, and it may be useful to other researchers or people interested in controlling NAO. The HTTPS constraint and the locked-down nature of NAO introduced additional development challenges, and the solutions to these challenges are worth sharing with the HRI community. We present characteristics of the web application, implementation details, how it has been set up, and how to use it. Although the application is usable in its current form, there are still things that can be improved to make the application more useful in other contexts. We therefore document how the remote control can be extended and potential starting points for improvement.