Our project

With our project, we want the people to start moving more. Since people are becoming less fit, especially elderly people, we wanted to design something that would help people to get in shape. However, not every one wants to do it alone or wants to go to the gym to get in shape. We aim to solve 2 problems with our project. We want people to get in shape, and we want people to be more social. We came to the conclusion that we want to create a social robot that helps with basic exercises. Furthermore, we also want it to have a point system, so people can compete against each other. This helps to bind people together while pushing them to exercise.

NAO BOT

Why are we not using the NAO bot

The NAO robot is a humanoid robot used for research and education. The robot was developed by the French company Aldebaran Robotics, which was acquired by the Japanese Softbank Robotics in 2015. We did not end up using this robot for our project. Due to its complex programming and not havong a built in tablet. This made it for us hard to work with and the tablet makes it nice to additional guidance for the people. I will list some pros and cons below

Pros

NAO has more control over its body. It can use it legs to walk or sit, for example. This makes it able to demonstrate a lot more exercises which could come in handy especially with more leg focused exercises.

NAO also has speech recognition and it can detect faces. This could be used to command the robot with only speech. And with its face recognition, it might be able to see if a person is having a hard time doing an exercise. This will be helpful if we implant an account system.

Cons

NAO is smaller than the pepper bot, which makes it a worse option in a bigger room or in group exercises.

NAO does not have a built-in tablet, which means it relies on the speech recognition. This might make it hard for people to use with a strange accent.

Due to its small size, the battery is also way smaller, which might make it hard for NAO to work for multiple hours.

Pepper bot

The Pepper robot is a humanoid robot developed by the Japanese company Softbank Robotics. The robot is designed to communicate with humans and can do this through speech, facial recognition and movement. This robot is also equipped with a tablet so you can use Android apps.

Why did we choose the pepper bot

Since we wanted to people to become more active, we needed a bigger bot than NAO. This so that everyone can use it and feels more connected. The tablet was also a highlight for us, since an android app really helps. The android app can be used to show videos of the exercises, and we can proscribe a fitness program if required.

Pros

Since The pepper bot is way bigger, it could be more engaging and appealing to our users.

The Tablet makes it easy to display fitness exercises, to follow along and interact with the robot.

The pepper bot can react to human emotions, which could come in handy if a user is having a hard time with an exercise.

Cons

The pepper bot does not have legs, which makes it harder for us to use it for leg exercises, since the user needs to do it of the tablet.