Robots and Physical Computing

Alpha2 is the next stage on from the more readily available Ubtech Alpha 1s, funded through a recent crowd sourcing  project. At the moment all I have done is the set it up with an iPad and tried out a few voice commands. It does dance on the slightly creepy command "Dance for me", personally, I am not sure of it saying "master". So far it looks good and there is plenty to investigate.  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. Twitter @scottturneruon

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...

Ok, I need to read the manual! Managed today to play with Aldebaran NAO again and was struggling to get it to interact - this is the should have read the manual bit, it was all in there. Mistake number 1 - I hadn't set a channel for all the apps so it was reacting to sounds and movement but not much more. So I set it. Mistake number 2 - not understanding the meaning of the changes in the colour of the eyes, when the eyes go blue NAO is listening. Now  it does what I was after - to be lead by the hand using the follow me app and react to some vocal commands. The video below shows "Red" in action. I would be interest in others experiences with these robots, if you would like please add your comments below. 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.

Photo by John Sinclair I had my first opportunity today to try an Aldebaran NAO robot as a teaching tool in an AI class today. The session was an end of term activity around summarising what we did in the AI class so far and questions.  A question came up around AI and it's impact on society. Perfect opportunity to bring in a social robot - especially as a precursor for when we include a session on social robotics next term. 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.

This is just a short post, as well as being able to go to Picademy this week ( http://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/picademy-7-8th-december-2015.html ); I have been fortunate to be able to borrow an Aldebaran NAO robot ( https://www.aldebaran.com/en ) for the weekend to play with. This is an extermly cool robot, straight out of the box, tracking movement and dynamic balancing. Hopefully, more on this in future posts. 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.

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...

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.

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...