Homework: Animate a Robot with Choregraphe

During our VAR master courses, we studied a lot of neural networks, computer graphics, or notions closely or remotely related to augmented and virtual reality. However, in this second part, the program has decided to focus on the different interactions between man and machine (whether the latter is a computer, a phone, glasses, ...). It was therefore important to raise the subject of robots. How to interact with them? How to program them? How to equip them with Deep Learning systems? All these questions are at the heart of the Social Robotics module.

In this article, I will briefly talk about the very first project we had to do: animating and making a Pepper robot talk. For this, we had to use the Choregraphe software. Here are the steps we had to go through to get there.

Install the software

This step seems trivial? Well, it wasn't at all. Having a MacBook, I had many installation problems. The very bad internet connection didn't allow us to install the software properly, so we changed location. This allowed us to discover the robotics laboratory of ENSTA, with Pepper in the flesh (or not).

Finally, after one hour, the software was on my computer. But it was impossible to launch it. Nothing was happening. Finally, after a long search, we found a version for Mac that worked quite well. It took us 3 hours. I was still able to quickly learn the basics, which I was going to develop during this mini-project.

Create the audio

Now we had to make a choreography of about one minute, where the robot moves and talks. To start with, I focused on the soundtrack. To generate the voice of the robot Pepper, I used a Text to Speech site. I just had to write the text I wanted, and I managed to get an mp3 file. After that, I used Adobe Premiere Pro to make cuts, integrate music and sound effects to finally have the final soundtrack. I exported the final file in mp3, to be able to integrate it in a "Play Sound" block that the robot will emit. And that's all !

Add animations

Then the robot had to be moved at the same time as the audio. This phase was very simple, because we just had to select different animations (disco dance, soccer, or guitar), and place them in synchronization with the audio. In the end, I managed to have a small sketch with audio and video synchronization. Here is the final render:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jATvKdy9zCk