In robot application for NAO in Python: Create a cognitive game (hard)

This is an example application for Cognitive Exercises.

In this tutorial we will focus on a step-by-step guidance through implementing the Cogntive Exercises RApp (Robotic Application).

The complete implemnention of the CognitiveExercises RApp can be found here

Preparation steps

For this tutorial we will use the following tools:

• A real NAO robot
• The rapp-robots-api for commanding NAO Robot.
• The Python rapp-platform-api as we will need to call several RAPP Platform Services.

Of course the standard prerequisites are an editor and a terminal.

RAPP Robots API libraries setup

The first step is to clone the appropriate GitHub repository in your PC:

$ mkdir ~/rapp_nao
$ cd ~/rapp_nao
$ git clone https://github.com/rapp-project/rapp-robyyots-api.git

The next step is to transfer the RAPP Python libraries to the NAO robot. This will be done via scp, assuming that the NAO robot's IP is 192.168.0.101 and username and password are nao:

$ cd ~/rapp_nao/
$ tar -zcvf rapp_robots_api.tar.gz rapp-robots-api/
$ scp rapp_robots_api.tar.gz nao@192.168.0.101:/home/nao

Now connect in NAO via ssh by ssh nao@192.168.0.101 giving nao as password. Then untar the API:

$ tar -xvf rapp_robots_api.tar.gz
$ rm rapp_robots_api.tar.gz

The next step is to update the PYTHONPATH variable. Since NAO has Gentoo as OS, we will modify the bash_profile file:

$ echo 'export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/nao/rapp-robots-api/python/abstract_classes' >> /home/nao/.bash_profile
$ echo 'export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/nao/rapp-robots-api/python/implementations/nao_v4_naoqi2.1.4' >> /home/nao/.bash_profile
$ source ~/.bash_profile

The last step to configure the rapp-robots-api is to declare the NAO IP. Since the robot API is in-robot, the IP must be localhost: 127.0.0.1.

The IP must be declared in the first line of this file, thus the nao_connectivity file located under /home/nao/rapp-robots-api/python/implementations/nao_v4_naoqi2.1.4/nao_connectivity should contain:

127.0.0.1
9559

RAPP Platform API (Python) libraries setup

The first step is to clone the rapp-api GitHub repository in your PC:

$ cd ~/rapp_nao
$ git clone https://github.com/rapp-project/rapp-api.git

The next step is to transfer the Python libraries to the NAO robot. This will be done via scp, assuming that the NAO robot's IP is 192.168.0.101 and username and password are nao:

$ cd ~/rapp_nao/
$ tar -zcvf rapp_api.tar.gz rapp-api/
$ scp rapp_api.tar.gz nao@192.168.0.101:/home/nao

Now connect in NAO via ssh by ssh nao@192.168.0.101 giving nao as password. Then untar the API:

$ tar -xvf rapp_api.tar.gz
$ rm rapp_api.tar.gz

The next step is to update the PYTHONPATH variable. Since NAO has Gentoo as OS, we will modify the bash_profile file:

$ echo 'export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/nao/rapp-api/python' >> /home/nao/.bash_profile
$ source ~/.bash_profile

##Writing the Cognitive Exercises RApp

We will work on the host machine while implementing the RApp and then we are going to transfer the application source files to the NAO Robot and execute.

Let's create a package for the application:

$ mkdir -p ~/rapp_nao/rapps/cognitive_exercises
$ cd ~/rapp_nao/rapps/cognitive_exercises
$ mkdir rapps && cd rapps
$ touch cognitive_exercises.py
$ chmod +x cognitive_exercises.py

Import the required components into the code:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# Import the RAPP Robot API
from rapp_robot_api import RappRobot
# Create an object in order to call the desired functions
rh = RappRobot()

from RappCloud import RappPlatformService
from RappCloud.CloudMsgs import (
    CognitiveExerciseSelect,
    CognitiveRecordPerformance,
    SpeechRecognitionSphinx,
    SetNoiseProfile)