Custom Gestures

The Nao and Pepper 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.

Installation

• Download and install the Choregraphe installer for Windows 10 64bit / Mac OS X 10.12 Sierra / Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus - 64bit only.

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

  • Note: Choregraphe does not work on modern 64-bit macOS (use a VM).

Usage

Open

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).

Open