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.

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.

Make Volume 27 Page 78

I am very happy about this, the only issue is that for some reason, they think my name is Carlos Asmat Jr., but there is no such thing as “Jr.” in my name.

This teaches humanity a lesson: never leave your robots alone, they will start conspiring.

Nao 1337 and Carlitos Downtown

We went downtown Montreal the other day with Nao 1337 and shot some pictures, this was mainly an exercise in vanity. See the resulting photo gallery below.

Nao 1337 getting ready for the red carpet

See the video below explaining the festival’s raison d’être:

Below you can see our submission to the festival: Nao 1337 Audition. 1337 impersonates several popular Hollywood robots in the hope of getting a role in a movie. How many can you recognize? Leave a comment below with your answers.

Screening

The festival started with a screening of all the selected robot films (53). It lasted around five hours and was punctuated by a break and some live performances by Jilted, and the excellent Robot Cowboy. Nao 1337 watched the screenings seated on a chair like the humans, but has some issued with the chair clogging its head ventilation and screamed (max volume) “head processor hot” at one point during an action scene of the very excellent Ping film.

See Nao 1337 watch the screening of its own movie below.

Red Carpet

After a fancy dinner at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse, we headed back to the 3LD for the Red Carpet Ceremony. The red carpet was already deployed so 1337 and I got ready to walk it.

I had programmed 1337 to hold hands and walk alongside me on the red carpet. I also included the ability to take breaks and show-off while standing on the carpet.

Nao 1337 and Carlitos about to walk the red carpet

Extra points for those who can recognize the FOTC member in the background of the picture above.

As shown in the video below, walking the red carpet was lots of fun and although it was fairly rough terrain for Nao (the carpet had some minor bumps that go unnoticed to humans).  1337 could traverse it without too much difficulty. The fall manager was enabled as well in order to soften the falls caused by the robot stumbling.

Although it is not shown on the video, 1337 can also tun and go backwards according to how its hand is pulled just like a human would do.

Unfortunately, 1337 did not get the Best Robot Actor Botsker (robot Oscar) but we met a bunch of new interesting people and it was lots of fun.

There were also performances by Double Rainbow, Reggie Watts and Josh Ventura during the ceremony. Those guys absolutely rock!

See more pictures or videos of Nao 1337 at the film festival here:

• New Scientist
• Robot Dreams
• Galo
• DSP Studios
• Technology Reviews
• Servo Magazine
• RobotShop Blog

And even more pictures!

Nao 1337 Film

The short video will premier at the festival, on July 17th, and I’ll make it available on my Youtbe channel at the same time (if there is a WiFi connection available) or a bit later that day.  So stay tuned and see 1337 awesome performance.

1337 will be also present and will walk the red carpet hopefully along some other robofriends.

The X-Ray Machine is watching You

Of course, I have no experience whatsoever with X-Ray machines so I am open to suggestions.  What should I do with it? Any suggestions? Any projects that you would like to see me do with it?

Also, how safe is operating this thing? I guess I will need a lead jacket.

Here are more details about the machine, it is a General Electric, and comes with an arm that makes it easy to handle since it is extremely heavy. The arm is lovely, the only problem is that it is heavier than the machine and needs to be wall mount. Needless to say, I have no walls that could endure so much torque.

X-Ray machine With Arm and Weird Base

The arm is designed to transfer pretty much all of its weight and that of the X-Ray generator into the wall. This makes it very convenient and also impossible to install in a regular house. At least, as far as I can imagine for now.

I also found what seems to be a very heavy base but I am not sure what it is suppose to do. nevertheless, I always have a good use for a large square steel plate.

X-Ray Machine from the garbage

Let me know your ideas and suggestions by posting a comment below.

The DIY Jamming Gripper

My main goal was to create a universal gripper that could be made from off-the shelves parts in a simple way with minimum customization.

Materials

• A shower head (that you will need to modify slightly)
• Some 1/4″ silicon tubing
• Some cottons balls
• A balloon
• A DC pump
• A DC wall adaptor
• A switch
• Some coffee
• A coupling
• A funnel to fill the balloon with coffee

DIY Jamming Gripper Materials

Putting it together

I think I succeeded my goal as you will see below: the gripper is quite easy to assemble and only required very minor modification of the shower head in order to fit the balloon in.

The steps for putting the gripper together are outlined in the video below.

As shown in the video below the proper works pretty well. unfortunately, I did not film it but it can also hold a glass filled with water as the original.

See the picture gallery below for more details about the building steps and the final result.

Oh! I forgot. The preview is hilarious.

Jawas don't mess with Nao 1337

Nao 1337 was featured in an article over at Branchez-vous.com. The pictures shown in the article were taken at the Geekfest. They also shot this short video mainly featuring my brother Alan.

Spammers hit again! I realized very late last night that my website was hacked and was redirecting to some male performance enhancement sites. I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused on your side.

On my side, Goggle no thinks I am really into male drugs and there are a bunch of weird keywords all over the place. So far, I contained the damages but I still need to clean my WordPress php in order to remove any spammer-injected code.

Hacked

As a result, now I added a bunch of security features, most of which are invisible to the readers. A noteworthy and certainly not invisible feature is the use of CAPTCHAs in the comments and the login area.

For those who are curious, the spammer probably injected some redirects using the comments feature.

Speech-Controlled Arduino Robot

For this project, I used the DFRobotShop Rover (a mobile Arduino kit), the VRbot speech recognition module by Veear, two XBee modules, an Arduino Uno, two XBee shields and some other components. see the video below to learn how to do your own.

In order to get more information about the project, the required tools, materials and code, please visit the Speech-Controlled Arduino  Robot project page at GoRobotics.net. The code is also available over there.

If you are interested in making your own, have a look at the kit we put together with RobotShop.

So what about Nao?

I have been terribly Nao-centric for a while and this it not going to change today. While programming the robot, it can become very frustrating to say the commands over and over again. For this reason and also in order to produce a perfectly repeatable input, I programmed Nao 1337 to say the commands for me (yes , I am lazy, I know). See the video below to see how Nao performed.

Carlos, Alan and Nao 1337 at the Geekfest

As announced before, we attended the Montreal Geekfest and Nao 1337 performed some dances and demos for all fellow geeks. We were placed right at the entrance and Nao 1337 had the mission of giving away free Geekfest pins. He could not do this though, since people preferred to see him greet them and dance. I have to thank my brother Alan for coming along and helping me with the presentation.

Nao 1337 chills out at the Geekfest

Nao 1337 was very popular with pretty much everybody and we made lots of friends. Nao got some Ubuntu stickers, could sit on a Star Wars cannon, and even learned a magic trick. In the picture above you see Nao 1337 actually chilling out (his motors were hot after some intense dancing).

As you can see towards the end of the video above, Nao 1337 can perform a very cool magic trick. I believe it is the first robot to do magic or at least to assist a magician. Leave a comment if you do not agree.

Nao gets some firepower

Nao wows family

The Geekfest was a lot of fun, you can see some more pictures of Carlitos’ Contraptions at the Geekfest here:

• Magicol Media
• Geekfestmtl Flickr Pool
• Branchez-vous
• I’ll add more links as I find them or if they are suggested to me.

As explained in the video below, I also use clear Duck tape to protect Nao’s surfaces. This tape is inexpensive, does not leave any residue and is very strong.

Also, as a follow-up of the video, in order to better protect Nao from the friction in the pelvic region, I use D-profile self-adhesive ribber tape (the kind you normally use in door frames to prevent air from coming in). Since it is white and mate like Nao it goes very well and makes for a nice belt.

Nao with rubber belt

Carlitos' Contraptions at the Geekfest

What is the Montreal Geekfest?

The Montreal Geek Festival (or Geekfest) is an enjoyable festival that brings all sorts of geeks together. Non-geeks are also welcome.

The festival’s mission is to:

1. Target all the different types of geeks and bring them all together.
2. Teach the public about geek culture while deconstructing the stereotypes.
3. Promote more specific Montreal geek festivals (Otakuthon, Worldcon, etc.);
4. Promote Montreal geek conferences (Podcamp Montreal, Webcom Montréal, etc.);
5. Promote Montreal geek organizations (W3Québec, Île Sans Fil, etc.).

The main goal is for all participants to have a good time and make new discoveries while enjoying the pleasant atmosphere.
- geekfestmtl.com

What is Carlitos’ Contraptions doing at the Geekfest?

I am a geek, it is no secret, and I love geeky stuff so the Geekfest is a very good place to be for me. Beyond that, I would like to share with the Montreal community my latest developments with the Nao, some of my previous contraptions and promote my upcoming gadgets design service. See the message below form Nao 1337.

See you all at the Geekfest!

I’ll be publishing my behaviours (the code running in the Nao) for everybody to download once I figure a nice and elegant way to do it.

In the video above, Nao 1337 dances one of my favourites tangos: Por Una Cabeza by Carlos Gardel.

It was to be expected that since I come from Argentina, my Nao would end up dancing tango and probably drinking mate in the near future.

Nao 1337 Waves

I named him Nao 1337 but I am open to suggestions. You can leave a comment below if you think of a better name. You can see a quick presentation of this awesome humanoid robot below.

I’ll be posting further developments, images and pictures as I progress. I am planning on making several applications in order to achieve my ultimate goal of having Nao play chess.

Nao 1337 Stands Up

The Bandana

As you can see in the pictures and videos, Nao1337 wears a red bandana. This is manly because he is bad-ass and utterly cool.

Nao 1337 Sitting

See the video below for a sneak peek of the robot. This video shows you what you would get if you were to join Aldebaran Developer program.

Stay posted for more Nao action. You can also visit my YouTube channel in order to see my latest Nao videos.

Nao's Packing Picture

I joined Aldebaran’s developer program and now my Nao is coming (much faster than I expected). They even sent me a picture of the box prior to shipping it.

This is an amazing experience and you can be sure I’ll be sharing all of it in here.

Stay tuned for more Nao news!

RGB LED Mood Cube

The main idea is to display colourful patterns and nice animations in this 3D LED matrix. In order to do so, the LEDs are controlled by a Rainbowduino, the lovechild of an Arduino and an LED driver.  The Rainbowduino can power up to 192 LEDs which is exactly the number required for this project (4x4x4x3 = 192).

See the instructional video below if you want to put together a cube of your own. Be prepared to watch me do a lot of soldering at 10x speed.

In order to access the full instructions and documentation for this project please visit the RGB LED Mood Cube project page it put together over at GoRobotics.net.

RGB LED Mood Cube Kit

If you want to make your own cube and are prepared to solder a lot, you might want to have a look at the full RGB LED Mood Cube Kit we put together at RobotShop.

For these projects, I’ll be putting together some electronic kits along with instructional blog posts and videos at GoRobotics.net. The main idea is to create more complex gadgets form off-the-shelf components.

So far, I have some projects in mind such as an LED mood cube, a mini automation web-server, and a speech-controlled robot to name a few.

Stay tuned for the upcoming projects.

As you can guess, I am Rorschach.