French company Aldebaran Robotics in collaboration with Japanese SoftBank, uses Java NAOqi operating system to develop several humanoid and programmable robots such as NAO, Pepper, and Romeo. Aldebaran Robotics vision is to make people’s life easier by developing robots that according to them are a ‘new species benevolent towards humans.’
According to Java magazine’s May/June 2015 edition, NAOqi framework allows you to create and develop robotic applications written in Python, C++, and other programming languages ‘through the libqi library, which provides crossplatform and cross-language support.’ The Java NAOqi SDK which is available as a JAR file besides supporting platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc, also offers ‘Java bindings and dedicated wrapper classes so you can use NAOqi easily.’
The Java magazine article specifically shows the way to create a new robot client application that can follow your orders by simply using the Java NAOqi SDK. All you have to do first is to download the JAR files that best fit your platform, from Aldebaran’s Community website. Java reminds that only Aldebaran’s customers will be able to download the JAR files and add it to their build path.
“The first step is to create an Application in the main method [...] For this, you must pass your robot’s IP address as an argument in the constructor of the Application. The Application is in charge of initializing the framework and connecting it to a Session, which connects services together, locally or over the network. When the Application is started, a Session is created and connected to your robot. Once the Session is ready, you can get services. A service is an interface that exposes what the robot can do,” according to Java magazine.
All robots have a ServiceDirectory where all the available services for each robot are listed. Among the listed services are: ALSpeechRecognition, ALMemory, AlMotion, ALTextToSpeech, and ALAutonomousMoves.
- “ALSpeechRecognition: A service that gives the robot the ability to recognize predefined words or phrases in several languages.
- ALMemory: A service that provides centralized memory used to store and retrieve key information related to the hardware configuration, which acts also as a hub for the distribution of event notifications.
- ALMotion: A service that facilitates making the robot move.
- ALTextToSpeech: A service that allows the robot to speak.
- ALAutonomousMoves: A service that enables subtle movements that the robot does autonomously.”
In order to make the robot listen and understand everything you say, according to Java magazine you first have to use a vocabulary that contains a list of any directions you want to give to the robot and then you need to subscribe to the ALSpeechRecognition service so that the robots can hear all your words and directions. For more information on how to run your Application and how to use the robots check out the May/June 2015 edition of Java Magazine here.
(Picture Source: Aldebaran.com)