Well, I do not know about a "better" way, but some of the tools in the Pepper SDK (like the robot simulator) are standalone executables so you could certainly manage to run them independently. On the ther hand there is no doc for doing this, so you would need some messing arround to figure it out.

Here's a link to the documentation, as it seems to be kind of hard to find through Google: https://android.aldebaran.com/... Note that the SDK contains a virtual robot so you can use it even if you do not have a Pepper.