NAO and Performance: Part (I)
In this first article of two on the NAO robot and Performance, PhD student Markus Häring is talking on his research about NAO and emotions.
He tells: "When it comes to the performance of the NAO robot, I'm really happy about the software from Aldebaran and API because it usually works very good. It's easy to use so it's perfect for our lectures".
"When the students come to my courses the first time, they have no idea how this works. And because it's so easy to use, they really get the first things done quite fast. One thing that's problematic is the camera of the robot, because you don't get the camera feed to a computer with good speed".
"Of course joints and limbs of the robot are not as moveable as human ones, but if you take your time to improve the movements of the robot you get quite good results, which was very important for our emotion expressions".
"You also can do stuff like shaking hands or wiggling with your arms in anger or trembling in fear which I was very surprised that we were able to do that with the robots. To get him shaking in fear we are just using the feet joints and the arms to get the whole robot moving but it works. And we use the ability of the robot to play every sound you like, with its loudspeakers".
"For our expressions we use music, sounds and modified recorded voices. We choose and modify these sounds according to psychological findings about emotions and sound. Also our body movements are based on psychological research. All our expressions were tested in large studies and when one expression failed to meet its target emotion, we looked again at our psychological references and modified the expression. Then we tested it again and usually it worked".
"This is a link to a webpage where you can see all the expressions that we implemented so far with our test results, and you can see which one works and which one didn't work as expected. We can do a lot of stuff with NAO and Aldebaran are always improving their software. I'm quite satisfied with them so far".
To be continued...
Links:
Markus
Häring
Augsburg
University
NAO and Education
NAO and Performance
NAO
and Research
Similar case study:
Aldebaran Robotics:
NAO and Education
[image source: Markus Häring]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]
"When it comes to the performance of the NAO robot, I'm really happy about the software from Aldebaran and API because it usually works very good. It's easy to use so it's perfect for our lectures".
"When the students come to my courses the first time, they have no idea how this works. And because it's so easy to use, they really get the first things done quite fast", tells Markus Häring.