Author: Alex Cater Email: cater@unlv.nevada.edu
Date: 6/11/17
Keywords: Furo, Start-up, Set-up, how to, basic instructions


The following tutorial will go over the basic operations for Furo. Furo is a service robot equipped with an on-board webcam and touch screen and is meant to be interactive with the user. Furo can follow you, talk to you with simple commands, play music, dance and many other things. I will discuss the absolute basics such as turning on/off Furo, how to charge and run Furo, make Furo dance and play music as well as a small introduction to programming Furo with Qt. Further tutorials on Furo will include an in depth look at the programming.

This tutorial's motivation is to show new users of the Furo robot what it's capabilities and functions are. After viewing the tutorial it is hoped that readers will understand how to navigate through Furo and it's Windows environment. No prior skills are needed or expected of the user before following through this tutorial.

The Furo section has should have Furo, a logitech webcam, a kinect RGBd camera, a keyboard/mouse, a charger, a backup battery, a backed up SSD drive and a thermal receipt printer. Some basic tools (screwdriver, pliers, etc.) are also in the Furo section as well.

The charger for Furo is shown below.



Furo's on-board battery is not the best and can only operate for a few hours at full charge so I suggest keeping the charger plugged into Furo while programming/operating. The charger can be plugged into the back and tightened down in the slot shown below on the left. The middle switch turns on/off Furo and the USB port on the right allows you to connect other devices.

After flipping the switch to turn Furo on you will be loaded into a Grub screen. There are two operating systems on Furo, 32-bit Ubuntu 14.04 and 32-bit Windows Embedded Standard. We will be focusing on the Windows portion of Furo for this tutorial. Although the screen is touchscreen it is best to have a keyboard and mouse connected since we do not have touchscreen supported on Ubuntu and because it is laggy in Windows. Note, it is labeled as “Windows Vista” in Grub. Also, for future reference the password to log into Ubuntu is double space bar.

Once logged in you will come to the windows main screen shown below. Inside the red circle is the shortcut that lets you explore some of Furo's actions and services. The purple circle is the folder to Furo's Qt files that will allow us to program Furo however we like.


Click on the Furo shortcut. It will bring you to a screen that hosts many options for Furo such as dancing, following and even changing the Furo avatar to your own face. The screen is shown below.

Additionally, upon the app start up there will be a smaller menu that appears as well. A picture of this menu is shown below. It hosts options for Furo such as a simple tester, ultrasonic tester, control board, etc. Explore these on your own as they will not be covered in this tutorial.

These are the basics of Furo to get her started, running and perform simple tasks. To further explore Furo we will talk about some on-board programming that we have to control things such as the motors and webcams in future tutorials. The program is located in the “furomotion” folder that is circled in purple above. For more information view the other tutorials on Furo.