"Hey Robot, who do you see?" - ROS-ifying Alexa Voice Commands

Getting your ROS robot to respond to your voice commands is a significant milestone in any robot design and development project. At this meetup, 3Spheres Robotics Project Engineer, Lucas Porto, will demonstrate how they use Amazon Voice Services (Alexa) and ROS to become the voice of Aether(tm), a collaborative service robot prototype.

Lucas will demonstrate how Aether has the ability to respond correctly to navigation and face recognition voice commands like:

• "Who do you see?"
• "When did you last see, Jon?"
• "Go to the kitchen."
• "Go to Jon"
• "Do an inspection"

Lucas will introduce a new, open source package, flask_ask_ros, that has been developed by the 3Spheres Robotics team to support voice command like the ones above. This package combines a Flask server and ROS node into a script that serves as an endpoint for a custom Alexa Skill. This enables information sent by voice to Amazon Alexa to be processed by other ROS nodes and services.

Beverages and pizza will be provided for RSVP's.