Robotics design, gadgets, hacks, and DIY technology.

New Scientist - 21/01/2012

This is a bit late so you can skip it if you already know it. I was interviewed and featured in an article about the future of robotics on the New Scientist magazine from January 2012. The article was written by the awesome Celeste Biever.

New Scientist article

Needless to say, I am truly humbled to have been quoted among so many amazing roboticists including Andrew Ng (my dear ML Class professor).

In the last year, I created my first full hardware design, including its custom firmware, for RobotShop. Of course, the design is open source so you can reuse it however you like. The end-result is the MyRobots Connect, a Serial-to-Ethernet gateway.

MyRobots-Connect - Eagle

I used the amazing Eagle and you can find the design files in the MyRobots Github page. If you want to know more about how this device works, see its wiki page. But in short, it translates serial messages received via XBee into HTTP GETs to MyRobots API.

See below some PCB pr0n.

Wolfram|Alpha Knowledge Engine

Using the Google Speech-to-Text behaviour, I created an interface to access the Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine through Nao 1337. As shown in the video below, Nao can now be used to answer very important existential questions about memes.

You can download the code in the project page at the Developer Program site.

If you remember, for last year’s Robot Film Festival, Nao 1337 walked the red carpet by holding my hand. I took some time in order to better document the behaviour, improve it a bit and make a video description of it that you can see below.

Of course, you can find the code and the project page at the Developer Program Site.

The Control behaviour is one if the first behaviours I created for Nao 1337. Although it was not very popular at the app contest, I truly believe it is the only useful behaviours so far. It is very simple and its main goal is to allow the user to make Nao sit , stand, change the volume level, the language and launch programs. This set of features might have been superseded by the current Nao Life behaviours from Aldebaran but I have not tested it yet. One very important requirement for me is to be able to perform all this actions while away of a computer or any other device and with no WiFi.

As always, you can find the code and further information about the behaviour in the project page at the Developer Program site.