https://www.thesocialrobot.org//The social robot project aims to build an open source robot companion. We're not aiming for AGI, but to create engaging software that supports both commercial robot platforms such as NAO, Pepper and Buddy but also custom hardware. 2024-10-20T20:37:07+01:00 Dave Snowdon https://www.thesocialrobot.org// Jekyll © 2024 Dave Snowdon /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2024-10-20T19:22:00+01:00 2024-10-20T19:22:00+01:00 https://www.thesocialrobot.org//posts/i-ve-been-doing-the-social-robot-wrong/ Dave Snowdon

I’ve been thinking about my lack of progress on The Social Robot project. It occurs to me that it’s been at a standstill because I’ve been finding it very hard to motivate myself. I think that’s because I’ve been down in the weeds since the beginning of the project. I started at the bottom and the idea was to build up to a useful system by building the base components and then building on top ...

2023-09-16T20:45:00+01:00 2023-09-16T20:45:00+01:00 https://www.thesocialrobot.org//posts/empowering-the-bedridden-robots-enable-work-and-social-engagement-from-home/ Dave Snowdon

Introduction Imagine being confined to your home, unable to step outside, yet still having the ability to work and socialize as if you were out in the world. This isn’t a futuristic dream; it’s a reality thanks to innovative robotics technology. Using robots to combat social isolation Many people found the social isolation caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns hard. But at least the lockdowns c...

2023-04-20T19:37:00+01:00 2023-04-20T22:47:53+01:00 https://www.thesocialrobot.org//posts/bridging-the-digital-divide-can-humans-and-ais-forge-true-friendships/ Dave Snowdon

I just finished listening to the Bot Love podcast and that got me wondering: “can it really be possible for a human and AI to be friends?” Asymmetric friendship normally refers to friendships in which the level of closeness or emotional connection between two people is unequal. However, in this article I’m more interested in capabilities. How different in capability can two entities be and sti...

2022-12-29T15:41:00+00:00 2022-12-31T19:09:49+00:00 https://www.thesocialrobot.org//posts/chatgpt/ Dave Snowdon

There have been so many recent articles on ChatGPT that I wasn’t originally planning to write one. It’s designed to be an AI assistant (think Alexa, Siri) rather than provide companionship and so it isn’t really comparable to Replika, Kuki or Woebot. However, a post on a facebook group made me wonder how clear that distinction is. So here we are, and I present to you yet another article on Chat...

2022-12-29T12:50:00+00:00 2022-12-29T12:50:00+00:00 https://www.thesocialrobot.org//posts/grpc-brain-2/ Dave Snowdon

In the previous article on gRPC I described creating a client and server in go that could stream messages using gRPC bi-directional streaming. The client in that article was just for testing purposes - not something I can deploy on one of my robots. The purpose of this article is to get closer to something that can run on actual robot hardware. We need to use the service description in protobuf...