Nao Robot Video

I've taken a video of a welcome routine I've programmed into the Nao robot. The manufacturers tell me that this is the first Nao in New Zealand!




I've not had the time to do anything with it so far this week. A whole bunch of administrivia has occupied my time (same goes for the book sadly).

I. Robot

Well pretty much as predicted no work on the book has happened this week. The Nao has eaten up all my time left over from writing a research grant application, reviewing conference papers and marking assignments.

I've got to grips with the Nao's programming language which is quite easy to use and have been playing with its sensors. Voice recognition is a bit hit and miss but the two video cameras on it work very well. For example it can now turn around until it sees a know mark and then walk towards that point - small steps but important ones. The basic idea is to build up a collection of basic routines, like turn around or walk ahead and then combine these into more complex behaviours.

Got the robot working

Well I got the Nao robot connected via WiFi, I had to use a spare WiFi router I have and open a port through the firewall (couldn't do that of course on the WiFi at work).

I've also now programmed a welcome routine that shows of the robot's movements, and voice recognition. It's balance is very good, mostly, though it has fallen over a couple of times. It goes down with quite a bang as it's quite heavy and nearly 2 feet high.

I've also got it to count how many faces it can see in front of it which works reasonably well.  I'll try to put some video up of it (can you post video on this blog?)
In the meantime Aldebaran have some videos on their website (scroll down) and there are some on YouTube (search for Nao robot). Needless to say no book writing has happened so far this week.

Work not Play

Well sort of. If you've been following my tweets you'll have seen that I took delivery of a Nao robot.

These are made by a French company  Aldebaran Robotics  and are state-of-the-art pieces of robot kit (at $25,000 NZD they ought to be).

Mine announces it self as "Nao robot # 607" when it is switched on. I spent most of the day installing software, charging its battery (it doesn't come fully charged like an iPhone or iPad), and getting it connected via ethernet and failing to connect via WiFi.

That will be tomorrow's task and then I have to get it to do something useful. I suspect that my productivity for stuff other than this robot will be rather low this week!