kuk-A-droid project

Title: kuk-A-droid project

Team members: Arnaud Bertrand

Abstract: Kuk-A-droid is a human-robot interaction (HRI) project, that is open source and hosted on GitHub.

Several famous robots designed for social interactions have a shape similar to humans, like a full humanoid body or a human-like face. The project's focus is to design what would be social interactions in the case of a robot with no human attributes, the KUKA youBot. As a side project, a part of the technical landscape will be based on an Android handset. This will help provide cheap sensors in the short term, and more important, a part of the code can be reused to develop similar properties for other robots.

So in a few words, we want everyone to be able to play and have fun with the youBot without a complicated interface, just by speech.

First successful steps have already been taken, like a youBot simulation realized with the web technology three.js. This simulation is available through a simple web browser and does not require any additional software. It can be used to move each joints with the sliders. The base can be moved in any direction with keyboard keys, the motion is exactly like the real youBot with the mecanum wheels. This demo will help us design affective motions and those motions will be implemented afterward in the robotic middleware ROS, in charge of the low-level control. The last component of the framework is the synthetic nervous system managed with an Android app. It will be the interface with the human and will give the robot high-level orders.

Software: Link to the project 

Video:  KUKA youBot demo in three.js