Programming for pepper

- Work in progress.

Version - 2024:5

Pepper is a lifesize humanoid robot on wheels, often used in commercial and educational settings. It has a lot of degrees of freedom in its upper body, making it ideal for complex animations and gestures. It is able to navigate and move around quite well thanks to its wheels. Although its face cannot display facial expressions, people have had some success using body poses, gaze, eye colours to convey emotions and robot states.

To create your own programs or squences to run on pepper you can use a visual program called Choreograph that allows you to use blocks to create sequences. This beginner friendly program has blocks that allow for movement, speech and speech recognition. (sidenote: speechrecognition does need a dictionary of possible options)

[insert image choreograph]

For more advanced programmers pepper can also be controlled through python and c libaries.

Choreograph for Mac, Windows and Linux can be downloaded here: http://doc.aldebaran.com/1-14/software/installing.html.

In the setup you will be prompted to enter a license key. Due to the discontinuation of pepper, the creators have provided a public key that works.

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Source: https://www.aldebaran.com/en/support/nao-6/downloads-softwares

Next continue with the installation wizard, make sure to allow network usage in private networks if prompted.

In Choreograph there is a virtual pepper robot that you can connect to for testing.

However if you want to connect to the phisical pepper in the interaction lab follow these steps:

1. Make sure that the pepper router is plugged in to power and ethernet from the wall.

2. Connect your computer to that network, the credentials are on the router or can be requested from lab technicians.

3. Turn pepper on by pressing the button on its belly underneath the tablet. It will say “ognak gnouk” once its completely booted up

4. Find the IP address of pepper by pressing its button under its belly once. It will say its IP which usually is starts with “192.168…..”

5. In Choreograph at the top bar click on Connection → connect to…

6. In the window that pops up select “Use fixed IP / hostname” and enter the IP address that pepper said before (to hear it again press the button on the belly once) 7. You should now be able to connect to pepper by clicking select.

If you have any issues try turning pepper off and on.

Make your first program by letting Pepper dance. First, in the Box libraries area, navigate to Entertainment → Dances → Pepper and drag the Disco dance to the main editor canvas. It now appears as an action box that you can use in the flow of your program.

Then you must connect this action box to the flow of the program, by connecting its onStart trigger to the main onStart. Do this by dragging a line from the top-left play icon in the main editing canvas to the play icon in the Disco action.

Now play your script by pressing the play button in the main toolbar or by pressing F5. You should see the virtual robot performing a dance.

A good 10 minute tutorial explaining all the basics can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubMuqIF9yRY