View Proposal

Proposer
Christian Dondrup
Title
Develop a middle-ware for the Pepper robot
Goal
Description
The Pepper robot (https://aldebaran.com/en/pepper/) is a humanoid robot made by Softbank Robotics. Sadly, Softbank Robotics has gone out of business and there is no official support for Pepper anymore. This means that the software used to control it, i.e. NAOqi (http://doc.aldebaran.com/2-5/index_dev_guide.html), is not supported anymore. Moreover, the version of it on the Pepper robots we have is only compatible with Python 2. This makes it hard for developers to install this API on their machine and to interface with the robot. However, NAOqi is only responsible for communication with the robot and is installed on the robot itself as well. Hence, I am looking to interface with the robot without the use of NAOqi. For this reasons, this project aims to create a software library that includes a control node on the pepper robot running in NAOqi and a communication interface to connect to the control node via the local network. This communication interface could be as simple as using socket IO or it could use something more advanced such as UDP. This interface should be compatible with python 3 and will be the go to solution for controlling the robot from an external PC. The control node needs to be implemented in python 2 on the robot using NAOqi. It should be able to receive commands via the communication interface and to stream data from the robots sensors, e.g. cameras and mic, to the external PC. Ideally, this interface would be integrated into ROS (https://www.ros.org/) but that is an optional extra.
Resources
Background
Url
Difficulty Level
Variable
Ethical Approval
None
Number Of Students
3
Supervisor
Christian Dondrup
Keywords
robot,robotics,middleware,ros,python,pepper
Degrees
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Master of Engineering in Software Engineering
Master of Science in Network Security
Master of Science in Robotics
Master of Science in Software Engineering
Bachelor of Engineering in Robotics
Master of Science in Robotics with Industrial Application
Back to List