Dev C Blog

Softbank Robotics (SBR) collaborators share their vision about robotics, AI, Machine Learning or creative content and animation among others hot technological and scientific topics.

Blog

Pepper illuminates your home with IoT

Pepper illuminates your home with IoT
Controlling a Philips hue lamp with a simple robotic app - Light up your living room just by greeting Pepper when coming home thanks to IoT (Internet of Things). There is a large variety of connected objects such as lamps, boilers, presence sensors, radiators and much more you can try to connect to your Pepper. You could imagine Pepper being the interface to your home’s devices and control them.Let’s connect Pepper to a Philips Hue lamp in the first place.
2019/11/12
Pepper closeup
Pepper QiSDK
Pepper illuminates your home with IoT
Blog

Pepper Slack messenger

Pepper Slack messenger
Sending Slack messages by voice thanks to Pepper - What if Pepper could help you increase your productivity at work? By linking the robot to a Slack channel, we will be able to send and receive messages by voice control thanks to Pepper.
2019/11/12
Pepper closeup
Pepper QiSDK
Pepper Slack messenger
Blog

Ubuntu 18 and Pepper QiSDK Emulator troubleshooting

Ubuntu 18 and Pepper QiSDK Emulator troubleshooting
You might face difficulties running the Pepper (QiSDK) Emulator from Android Studio under Linux Ubuntu 18.04 and a SDK error message may be displayed. You will find below how to solve this issue. This has been tested using API 4 of the SDK plugin, Android Studio 3.4.1
2019/11/12
Pepper closeup
Pepper QiSDK
Ubuntu 18 and Pepper QiSDK Emulator troubleshooting
Blog

“Pepper, is today a holiday in Japan?”

“Pepper, is today a holiday in Japan?”
Linking Pepper to a web API using android's Retrofit client - Learning about API use and how to link them to Pepper, we will grant the robot access to the Nager.date API, an online service containing data about the upcoming holidays worldwide. The goal of the app we will create would be for Pepper to answer to related questions such as: “Pepper, is today a holiday in Japan?”.
2019/11/12
Pepper closeup
Pepper QiSDK
“Pepper, is today a holiday in Japan?”
Blog

Pepper plays ball-in-the-cup

Pepper plays ball-in-the-cup
We made Pepper the robot play games of skill with AI (Artificial Intelligence) at SBRE - SBRE AI Lab (Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) taught Pepper how to successfully throw a ball in a cup and a dart at the dartboard (they are exactly the same dynamic problem) using dexterity and a bit of dynamical systems theory. Here is the story of what it takes to match elementary games and robotics.
2019/05/17
Pepper plays ball-in-the-cup
Blog

The Lottie animation tool

The Lottie animation tool
Experimenting the flexible and efficient Android library on Pepper’s tablet - Light and flexible, Lottie is a popular mobile library to make 2D animations on Android devices such as Pepper’s tablet. Indeed, Pepper is not just a voice user interface, but the tablet animations are very helpful in improving the interactive efficiency of the robot. At SoftBank Robotics we already tried out Lottie and there is what we found.
2019/03/12
Pepper closeup
Pepper QiSDK
Pepper closeup
Pepper (NAOqi 2.5)
The Lottie animation tool
Blog

CROWDBOT: Safe Navigation of Robots in Dense Crowds.

CROWDBOT: Safe Navigation of Robots in Dense Crowds.
CROWDBOT, an European Collaborative project enables robots to freely navigate and assist humans in crowded areas. - Today’s moving robots stop when a human, or any obstacle is too close, to avoid impact. This prevents robots from entering packed areas and effectively performing in a high dynamic environment. CROWDBOT aims to fill in the gap in knowledge on close interactions between robots and humans in motion.
2020/05/26
Pepper closeup
Pepper QiSDK
Pepper closeup
Pepper (NAOqi 2.5)
NAO closeup
NAO⁶
CROWDBOT: Safe Navigation of Robots in Dense Crowds.