For the first part of my Capstone / Senior project for my bachelor degree, CS 480 in Fall 2018, we were put into groups and assigned projects for clients. Myself and four other computer science
students were given the task of programming a Nao robot, a robot designed by Aldebaran Robotics, now owned by the SoftBank Group of Japan. The purpose of this project is mainly to showcase
the Central Washington University computer science program. Our client was Dr. Szilard Vjada, an
assistant professor in the department, and our project supervisor was Dr. Donald Davendra, also an associate professor at Central. We called our group the AriGato group - "arigato" means
"thank you" in Japanese. CS 481, the continuation of the senior project, took place in the Winter 2019 quarter, and that's where we did the bulk of our work on the robot.
The Nao robot can be programmed through one of the company's software, Choregraphe. Here, we can visually create "boxes" which have code in them and arrange them in a way that they each interact with
one another. While the robot can use Python, C++, and Java, we chose to use Python as that was the language with the most support. In particular, we used Python 2.7, as that was the last well-supported
version for this model of robot. Here are just some of the modules that we coded and uploaded to our Nao robot:
- Age Guesser:
- This module will have the Nao use its facial recognition abilities to guess a human's age. We activate the module by telling now to "guess my age."
- OMDb Movie Information:
- If we ask Nao to "tell me about a movie," Nao sends the requested movie through an API from OMDb and tells the user what year the movie came out, who starred in it, and
what its Rotten Tomatoes rating is.
- Sing the Anthem:
- Upon request, Nao will "sing" the U.S. national anthem (it plays an audio file that is onboard the robot).
- Push Ups:
- You can ask Nao to do anywhere from 1 to 10 push ups.
- What's the Temperature:
- Using a weather API, Nao can tell you what the current temperature is outside in Ellensburg, Washington at the time of request.
Feel free to take a look at all our current code for the robot as well as our software requirements specification document, class presentations, and progress report. These are available on the
AriGato's GitHub repository. Below is a video from our midterm presentation in Winter 2019 showcasing some of our modules up through mid-January 2019.