Two guests who are getting ready to graduate from Kindergarten visited Halmstad University last Friday to meet Jonson and Mörner, two members of the NAO Halmstad Group. The visit was hosted by Jonas Jonson (no relation), Alexey Taktarov, Yingfu Zeng, Jawad Masood, and Walid Taha. (See more pictures from visit)The special guests became interested in meeting the robots after seeing a segment on TV4 about the NAO Halmstad Group. The visit included showing off some of the capabilities that the NAOs come pre-programmed with (including dancing, Tai Chi, walking, speech synthesis, and speech recognition) and an interactive discussion of how the robots can be programmed by a sequence of basic primitives such as walking, turning, moving hands, closing the grip, and so on. This was followed by a discussion of what these robots are made of, including cameras, motors, and (as one of our young guests pointed out) microphones. They were also showed a recording of a recent walk by Jonson using code that was developed by our colleagues at the AMBER lab at Texas A&M.
The guests appeared content with the demonstrations. Depending on the level of their future interest in this subject, we may have had seven or eight generations of engineers at this meeting. We will keep our fingers crossed for the next twelve years :-)
