Lecture 7: Robotics middleware

Question 1

What are humanoid robots? Why are they significant?

Answer 1

Humanoid robots resemble human body structure and capabilities.

They are significant for helping understand more about humans.

They are able to interact with a human environment. You need a human-like body to develop a human-like cognition.

Question 2

What is one physical feature of the Pepper robot?

Answer 2

It has omnidirectional wheels to replace legs.

Question 3

What is the main use of robotics middleware?

Answer 3

To abstract low-level components.

Question 4

What are 3 advantages of middleware?

Answer 4

Modularity
Recongfigurability
Reduced coupling
Independent language

Question 5

What is the most widely used middleware?

Answer 5

ROS (Robot Operating System)

Question 6

Explain an example of middleware.

Answer 6

ROS is the most commonly used middleware. It is open source and has large community support. Nodes publish on topics which are read by subscriber nodes.

YARP (Yet Another Robot Platform) is similar to ROS but has smaller community. It is used for certain robots like iCub.

NAOQI is the proprietary software of SoftBank Robotics. Used across SoftBank robots (Pepper, Nao, etc.)

Question 7

How is Pepper programmed?

Answer 7

There are many options. ROS can be used as the middleware to program Pepper. Choreographe is used to program the robot to behave a specific way. It uses graphical blocks instead of code. The last option is NAOqi which has interfaces in Python and C++