Today I want to take some time to write about the next step I am currently taking to have both my self-build Raspberry PI robot and the Nao robot interact with each other on a useful basis. You might have already seen some posts before like https://renzedevries.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/robot-interaction-with-a-nao-robot-and-a-raspberry-pi-robot/ about robot interaction or perhaps the model train one https://renzedevries.wordpress.com/2016/09/13/having-fun-with-robots-and-model-trains/. However both these posts did not really demonstrate a practical use-case.

Recently I presented about this topic at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp where I attempt to demonstrate how to control one robot from another using Kubernetes, Helm and Minikube combined with some IoT glue 🙂 The scenario I demonstrated was to create a Robotic Arm from my Raspberry PI robot that I use to remote control a Nao robot.

Robot arm

In order to have some form of remote control I have created a Robot Arm which i can use as a sort of joystick. I have created the robot from the same parts as described in this post (https://renzedevries.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/build-a-raspberry-pi-robot-part-2/). The robot arm is controller via a Raspberry PI that has a bit of Java software to connect it to MQTT to send servo position changes and to receive commands from MQTT to execute motions on the robot arm.

The robot looks like this:



Nao Robot

For the Nao robot I have written a customer Java controller that connects to the remote API of Nao. This controller software does nothing else but allowing remote control of the Nao robot by listening to commands coming from MQTT.

Connecting the Robots

Like before in previous setups I will be using my custom Robot Cloud deployment setup for this experiment. I will be deploying a number of micro-services to a Kubernetes cluster that is running on AWS. The most important public services are the MQTT message bus which is where the robots are sending status (sensors/servo’s) towards and received commands from (animations, walk commands etc.). For more detail on the actual services and their deployment you can check here https://renzedevries.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/robot-interaction-with-a-nao-robot-and-a-raspberry-pi-robot/

The most important part of bridging the gap between the robots is to have a specific container that receives updates from the servo’s on the robot arm. Based on events from those servo’s (move the joystick forward) I want to trigger the Nao robot to start walking. The full code with a lot more detail is available in this git repository: https://github.com/renarj/robo-bridge

Conclusion

It’s quite a complex setup, but the conclusion is that by using my Kubernetes deployed Robot Cloud stack I can use the robot Arm to control the Nao robot. If you want to see a bit more with a live demo you can check out my Devoxx presentation here:

One thing I could not demo at Devoxx was the interaction with a real Nao Robot, I have made a recording how that would look and also put this on youtube here: