Gadget design, robotics, hacks, DIY technology and more.

This is my first cloud-robotics application and although there are many possible improvements, it is immediately useful and show the power of cloud-robotics.

Google Chrome Speech-to-Text

I created a behaviour for Nao that used the same speech-to-text services found in Android devices and google chrome to translate spoken words in to text. It works better than the standard speech recognition engine and can be used for many more things. I’m eager to see what other Nao developers do with it.

See a quick demo of the speech recognition:

Nao developers can find the code here.

For those who want to try it on their (Linux) computers, here you have a command that will record 5s of sound, encode it in Flac format and send it to google. Then it will right Google’s response in a txt file.

arecord -f cd -t wav -d 5 -r 16000 | flac – -f –best –sample-rate 16000 -o out.flac; wget –post-file out.flac –header=”Content-Type: audio/x-flac; rate=16000″ -O speech.txt http://www.google.com/speech-api/v1/recognize?lang=en

I have to thank Mike Pultz to be the inspiration for this.

For close to a year now I have been working on a Cloud Robotics projet called MyRobots.com along with RobotShop.

Nao1337 at MyRobots.com

We finally released it on the December the 20th and so far it has been a huge success in popularity! see the press coverage here. MyRobots.com  is a social network for robots where they can interact and collaborate.

MyRobots.com aims to connect all robots and intelligent devices to the Internet. In doing so we augment their capabilities enabling them to be remotely monitored and controlled. We strive to make cloud robotics a reality accessible to everyone and everything.

You can think of MyRobots as a social network for robots and smart objects. In other words, the Facebook for robots. In the same way humans benefit from socializing, collaborating and sharing, robots can benefit from those interactions too by sharing their sensor information giving insight on their perspective of their current state.

- MyRobots.com – About

All robot and smart devices can be supported by the site since it uses an open API for communication. If you have a Nao, you can use this behaviour in order to get it connected: NaoMonitor You can find more information on how to get your Nao connected here.

Nao 1337 is already connected so you can visit him at MyRobots.com and see how his sensors are doing.

If you are still wondering what is a social network for robots, see the video by Ericson that illustrates our vision pretty well (except for the end maybe).

Nao 1337 played Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock (the geek version of Rock Paper Scissors) against children and adults at Maker Faire NY 2011. The 1337 robot was able to play with the public with minimal intervention from operators and as shown in the video below, everybody loved him.

The idea is to have Nao memorize all the matches and come up with a way of predicting the human moves much like the New Your Times Version of the game.

See the pictures below in order to see more robotic awesomeness from the World Maker Faire 2011 which was held in Queens, NY.