It is good time to play with Social Robots

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 is not yet released (end of 2015/beginning of 2016) but the videos make it look very interesting. A stationary robot that seems to be about providing a social interface to many of things we do.







Buddy
A robot soon to be released by Bullfrog Robotics (http://www.bluefrogrobotics.com/buddy-your-companion-robot/) . This is an incredible cute robot. 




Related links
It is a good time: 1 Introduction


All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

OhBot and Detecting Faces

With a bit of time off, I had a chance to play with the Ohbot (see Previous related links below) a little more. My son and I played with trying to find could we get it to say hello if there is a face on camera but otherwise make it move randomly as if it was looking.

We based the code on the examples codes that can be found at the OhBot website (http://ohbot.weebly.com/).

The video below shows it in action.



Previous related posts

• OhBot Experiment
• OhBot a social robot

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

OhBot Experiment

As a bit of fun and an excuse to play with the OhBot - I was wondering whether I could get it to produce an introduction to a module when hello is said by the user.

Features

• To move randomly with small movements.
• When the word hello is spoken it starts speaking (or appear to).
• Go to a standard starting point initially.

The video below shows the results.





Related links

Ohbot- social robot
OhBot (http://ohbot.weebly.com/)



All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

Ohbot a social robot

I have just finished  building an OhBot (http://ohbot.weebly.com/); a robot face (see picture to the left - I fixed the cross-eyes later). This cool little kit actually comes with some very nice software, that includes face tracking and a Scratch-like blocks programming language.

One bit of advice is put as aside several hours to do this, my experience is takes quite a while to build (that might just be me though). It is worth it, when you see the head, eyes, etc moving it is very engaging. 

The site has links to all the software needed and some very useful sample programs.

This is nice engaging robot that comes with a user-friendly programming language. The finished robot reminds me a bit of Cynthia Braziel's Kismet robot (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/kismet/kismet.html) from MIT in the 1990s. So this might also be a good introduction to the area of social robotics and, as at the time of writing this, only £99, a relative inexpensive way into this area.

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.