Choreographe

Owned by Ündes, B. (Bülent)
Last updated: Nov 04, 2022
2 min read

The NAO robots can display a wide variety of gestures to communicate non-verbally and animations to spruce up the interaction. Aldebaran/Softbank Robotics has made a gesture pack available that you can use in your projects. To access these gestures, you need an additional software tool called Choregraphe.

Choregraphe is a visual programming environment to program the robot with. Although useful for quick demos, the limitations quickly surface when trying to design a decent interaction. We only use Choregraphe to install gestures on the robot. This is a necessary step to be able to access them from your application.

Windows/Linux:

The installation for Windows/Linux user is straightforward. Please download Choreoraphe on this webpage here

  • On Windows, you may also need some C++ Redistributable Packages for Choregraphe to work.

  • Note: Choregraphe may not work on modern 64-bit macOS (see the Mac installation description below).

FAQ Linux

  • libz.so.1 not found when starting Choregraphe after installation

    • inside a terminal, navigate into the installation folder of Choregraphe

      cd lib sudo mv libz.so.1 libz.so.1.old sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1

Mac installation:

Installing Choreographe on Mac is less straightforward. Note that this might harm your Mac and could lead to potentially dangerous situations. We do not take responsibility for any problems that might occur due to the installation!

This page walks you through the steps needed to install Choregraphe on a Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS Monterey (12.5).

  1. Download Choregraphe (2.8.6) for Mac from https://www.aldebaran.com/en/support/nao-6/downloads-softwares . Be sure to download the binaries.

  2. Move the binaries folder to the /Applications folder. Unzip the folder there.

Then, we need to disable almost all of macOS’s security. Note that this might harm your Mac and could lead to potentially dangerous situations. The following steps are based on http://support.old.unitedrobotics.group/support/discussions/topics/80000657453/page/last.

  1. Open a Terminal

  2. Navigate to the /Applications folder. The backslash is important!

  3. Run sudo spctl --add choregraphe-suite-2.8.6.23-mac64

  4. Run sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine choregraphe-suite-2.8.6.23-mac64

Now, you should be able to start choregraphe. For this, navigate to the folder choregraphe-suite-2.8.6.23-mac64and run the command ./choregraphe

If this doesn’t work you might have to disable more security layers with sudo spctl --master-disable. Restart and try again.

Important:

It might be the case that choregraph will get new versions. That means, that instead of sudo spctl --add choregraphe-suite-2.8.6.23-mac64 , one might need to adjust the code according to the version installed. The previous example assumes 2.8.6. Therefore, one needs to run the following, where ‘<>’ is a placeholder for the respective version:

sudo spctl --add choregraphe-suite-<YOUR VERSION>-mac64

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine choregraphe-suite-<YOUR VERSION>-mac64

Also, of course you need to navigate to the correct folder, where the version might also differ.