Developer Center v1.2 Release note ("Carnival")

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Developer Center General Overview

Developer Center is the website dedicated to developers and proxy (prospect, lead tech...) providing all the necessary materials for them to develop amazing applications.

We have been regularly deploying new versions (v0 "Early birds" - March 2019, v1 "Opening Night" - May 2019, V1.1 - November 2020), now it's carnival time!

[Editorial] A friendly robot in a science museum: over 1,400 days and counting!

A long time ago, back in 2014, our company was invited to make a robotic demo with NAO for children in “La Cité des Enfants”, a temporary exhibition hosted at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, in Paris. La “Cité” is considered to be the largest science museum in Europe. From there the relationship never stopped. As Pepper was unveiled to the public, the robot’s first appearance was in the Museum… Not as a demo, but as a real team player. Indeed, Pepper was placed at the main entrance, meeting hundreds of thousands of people every year since. How did that work out? Six staff people from the visitors and guest welcome team from the Museum were fully trained on pepper, allowing our charming and ever-joyful robot to entertain visitors - especially young kids coming to visit the “Cité” from all over Europe. Working 364/365 days a year - yes Pepper was only allowed to rest and be disconnected on Jan 1st - our beloved robot has entertained and guided visitors along this beautiful museum entrance and corridors. A new step was undertaken last year by the “cité” project to display a full-scale robotic exhibition. As Christophe Dupouy, our talented Project manager, explains in the following article, the new Robot exhibition was a massive way to boost the audience’s knowledge of robotics. 400,000 visitors have already purchased Robots Expo tickets. Over the next 5 years period, both Pepper and NAO will showcase robotics at its best, to benefit humanity. Of course, this relationship helped our R&D teams to improve the robot interactions, flows and apps. This is why we're thrilled to share this Developer Center “carnival” release and its procession of new body animations, snippets on Github, virtual environments and even Chatbots connectors.

Nicolas Halftermeyer Communications & Product Branding Director

"Carnival" Release Summary

Last version provides a lot of new content and a few updated frontend features.

Experience feedback from the team involved in the Cité des Sciences & de l'Industrie project
Reportage: Pepper and NAO show off at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie
Interview: Christophe DUPOUY, project manager, talks about his experience
Lessons learnt: A Realistic approach of robotic behaviour development
Making Multimodal presentation, a brand new lesson on how to combine animations, sounds and images to make Pepper give an expressive presentation
SoftBank Robotics Labs: A batch of public SBR projects (experimental code snippets, helper libraries, etc.) hosted on GitHub;
Scientific publications reflecting the importance of SBR robots in current scientific research programs such as
QiBullet a simulation tool enabling robot-users to experiment in virtual environments
Chatbots and the uncanny valley of linguistics the state of the art on chatbots and vocal interaction