Robots and Physical Computing

Sometimes what I do as job can have some major personal pluses (I get to play with robots some of the time), one of these has been the opportunity to introduce people to social robots, and recently I have been lucky enough to managed to do this four times-   twice to my own computing students, but also to groups of primary school children in two events (see below).  Apart from it's what I enjoyed doing; the social robots we are starting to see are great, but there is so much more that could be done. Who is going to develop this - possibly one of these children? Why not? It has taken nearly 40 years to get from R2D2 on the screen to some of the social robots we are seeing launched now, in another 40 years we might have something as bright as R2D2 (R2D2 was always brighter than C3PO) . Why wouldn't one or more of these bright children or one of the students I teach, be the ones to contribute to this? They have the enthusiasm, with the changes in the National Curriculum in...

I  managed to do something I have want to do for a long time, show off social robots; (now I have three goes at it) thanks to the recent purchase of NAO robots by the University of Northampton.  Session 1 In an in-reach STEAM activity day I have had the opportunity to show the robots in action to a group of 8 years olds. As well presenting a short presentation on social robots. Meeting our robots at our #science day for girls pic.twitter.com/0XwllXL40s — Chris Fidler (@Chris_UNPR) March 3, 2016 Meet Smurf and Red at Girls S.T.E.A.M. @UniNorthants @scottturneruon @Changemaker_Hub @nick_petford pic.twitter.com/ZMt07ZrSVh — STEM at UN (@STEMatUN) March 3, 2016 Social robots meet red and smurf from Scott Turner I would be interested to hear how others are using NAOs via comments. Session 2 and 3 I have managed to include a physical example of Social Robots into my teaching. The aim of the session was to teach about social AI, revolving aroun...

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 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 ine...