Robots and Physical Computing

Social robotics has a research area in Universities for a while, looking into interface with robots that are based around our social cues, or modelling social cues to understand neurodiversity such as Autism. Some great work by companies such Aldebaran Robotics ( https://www.aldebaran.com/en ) with their Nao and Pepper robots have raised the profile of social robotics. People like Cynthia Breazeal leading on this: What I find most exciting is these robots are now they are coming into the home. OhBot At the entry level in terms of price, and very well featured, is the OhBot ( http://ohbot.weebly.com/ ). This is a  is a kit for a robot head with a Scratch-like interface having face-detection, some speech recognition in the current version; controlling several servos to get facial movement. It has provided hours of fun so far (see the video below). This is a great bit of kit for its price. Jibo Jibo has been developed by a company headed by Cynthia Breazeal. It...

I have want to write this for a while, a short series of blog posts on why I think this is in an incredible time to be interest in robots and physical computing. Three posts in the series: - Introduction - Small robots - Social robots It only takes a quick look on line to see a vibrant and growing network of people who are sharing and supporting each other to use physical computing to do imaginative things. They might go under different names PiJams, Makerspaces, etc but essentially it is about bring people with similar interests (and those are wide) in physical computing together. That is just, physically, but now adding a on-line community that also shares and supports each other you have something that is worth being involved in. If you are unsure  what I mean by this have a look at some of the following people's twitter timelines: @whaleygeek ( https://twitter.com/whaleygeek ) @ martinohanlon ( https://twitter.com/martinohanlon ) @simonmonk2 ( https://twitter.com/simo...