I have to admit I am having a lot of fun working with the Nao Robot on the Developers Program. The Nao software provides a platform that allows really rapid development and lets you achieve very satisfying results in relatively short timeframes.
To this end I have been playing with both the speech recognition engine and the video recognition engine. Both are standard features of Nao and when combined offer a great way to interact with the unit. As an experiment I decided to try and write a simple game for my two and a half year old nephew. He always likes to play with my iPad when I see him and he particularly likes an app I downloaded for him that shows, among other things, farmyard animals. With this in mind I have managed to create a basic game where Nao will ask him to find a picture of a particular animal and show it to him. We have yet to see if he likes the game as it was only finished, in its most basic form, this evening but below is a short video of one of my test sessions.
The video shows two correct answers, one wrong answer and a situation where Nao does not understand a voice command and requests clarification.
Posted: 11/03/2011 22:57:47
by
Carl Clement
As I have mentioned before, I am very interested in how people accept robots into their lives and how society itself will bring these new tool into its folds. As such I believe there is much research to be done (and I am sure being done) about both the socialisation of robots and the anthropomorphic qualities we can instil in our mechanical friends.
To this end I have been looking at a number of approaches to assist this acceptance, one of which is the use of personalised voices on my robot to aid in his acceptance with the people around him. Okay, around it but I think of it as a him , see, anthropomorphism at work. Anyway, below is the first experiment with the Nao robot's text to speech engine's voice shaping.
Posted: 08/03/2011 23:00:32
by
Carl Clement
Sorry it has been a bit quiet on here recently. I have been heads down getting to know all the features and interfaces to my Nao.
In the meantime, Taylor Veltrop over in Japan has been pushing forward with his development that integrates Kinect, ROS and the Wiimotes to control.
Posted: 07/03/2011 23:02:56
by
Carl Clement