Hello Pepper: Getting started to program robots on Android

I didn’t get to meet Pepper the humanoid Robot at Google I/O but I watched the video afterwards: A new development frontier: Android + Pepper the interactive robot. Love the robots’ dance! I was super excited to hear that Pepper will become available in the U.S. later this year, and Android developers can now program robots!

A few weeks after I/O, I attended a Seattle Java User Group meetup. That evening I met Pepper in person, and I learned about the Future of Social Robotics from Nicolas Rigaud (slides here).

Equipped with microphones, cameras, sensors and an intelligence to perceive emotions, Pepper was designed for social interactions. He has an Android tablet on his chest which is very convenient for displaying image, video and texts. Pepper is 4 feet tall (1.2 meters) and can connect to the network with either Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Pepper is multi-lingual in English, French, Japanese and Chinese.

I wanted to learn more about Pepper. So I followed the instructions from the Pepper SDK for Android and was able to quickly get set up and create my first robot Application with Android Studio.