Customizing NAO's gestures

Owned by Ündes, B. (Bülent)
Last updated: Oct 24, 2022
2 min read

The NAO robot 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. If you have not installed Choreographe yet, then please consult this page first.

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.

Usage

To be able to install software on your (physical) robot, follow these steps:

  1. Connect with the robot (see #1 in the figure above).

    1. You need to be on the same network as the robot. If you are, the robot should be auto-detected by Choregraphe (green head in the connection menu). If this does not work, you can also manually connect by entering its IP-address.

  2. In the bottom-left part of the screen (#2) you can find all the available animations.

  3. Drag and drop the animation you want to the main part of the screen (#3) and connect them by drawing the “wires” as shown in the image.

  4. Run the animation by hitting the green play button (#4) to test if everything is working properly.

  5. When everything is working as intended, go to the properties (#5). See figure below how to set the properties properly.

  6. After everything is set up properly you can install the animation on the robot (#6).

  7. Now you can access this animation, for example in your Python code by calling do_gesture("<gestureID>/behavior_1").

    1. In the properties menu first set the "Supported languages" to "Language Independent" (see #1 in the figure below).

    2. Give the gesture a concise name and enter that name in both the "Application title" and "Application ID" fields (#2).

 

There are also two good Youtube tutorials that will walk you through the basics of Choreographe:

Part 1

Part 2