Personally, for interactive stuff, I would look at Net::SSH::Any or any of the modules that Net::SSH::Any uses. There you can conveniently send commands/input over a channel without needing Expect at all.

Alternatively, you could look at IPC::Run for opening a child process (in your case, the ssh connection) for reading and writing, but this goes close to reimplementing Expect yourself and won't solve the password issue.