Robotic enthusiast.
So far we have developed all the robot's functionalities locally within our PC.
Now it's time to connect the robot to the Internet.
This is a crucial step as it opens up potentially infinite number of applications.
And these are the real innovation, the true revolution in the field of robotics.
A robot connected to the Internet is no longer limited by the computational power and resources it has
on its own computer.
Instead, it potentially gains access to a cloud and a range of constantly evolving and expanding resources
and applications.
Among these applications.
One of the most interesting for robotics is the one of the voice assistants.
If we think about it, in the industries and factories where we are more used to encounter robots,
they are often controlled with larger and cumbersome joysticks, especially during the learning phase,
or to initiate a specific movement.
This type of controller is well suited for an industrial environment where dust, water and restrictive
safety measures require robots to be operated using these complex systems.
However, there is an increasing transition from industrial robotics to domestic robotics in this scenario.
Robots move from having a safe and reserved space uniquely for their movements to having to share their
space with living beings, requiring us to consider other aspects of robotics that have not been taken
into account so far, such as human robot interaction or Hri.
In this new scenario of interaction between humans and robots, what a better way to communicate than
using our voice.
The tool that has allowed us to communicate with other human beings since our appearance on Earth to
also communicate with robots.
True voice.
We can convey our intentions, request tasks to be executed, and also receive feedback from the robot,
enhancing our awareness of the actions and movements that the robot is going to do.
Among the available voice assistants.
I have used it to choose the Amazon ones for this course because it offers the possibility to add new
features to the voice assistant and define new behavior or skills.
This is made possible thanks to the convenient interface and the API that Amazon Alexa provides to the
developers of application that use different Alexa skill and its language interpretation software.
These API are known as Ask SDK and are offered in combination with a user friendly graphical interface
that allows us to test these features even without using the physical device.
Therefore, you can comfortably follow this section of the course without having the Alexa voice assistant
at your disposal.
To complete this section, in fact, you won't need to purchase the Alexa Voice assistant.
Instead, you can access the Alexa Developer web page and interact with the assistant through the voice
to control the robot.
However, before we can send voice commands to the robot, we need to establish a connection between
our robot or the simulated one that is running on our PC and the Alexa voice assistant.
Fortunately, the communication between these two modules is straightforward and you might already be
familiar with it.
It's called the Internet, with the help of a software called Ngrok.
We will create a web server on our PC or robot and we will provide the web address to this server to
Amazon.
Alexa allowing it to communicate with our robot.
Internally.
We will then connect this web server to Ros two so that it can send comments to the action server we
named Task Server in order to move the robot as requested by the voice assistant.