Brad Pitney 12/11/2013 ECE 578 Perkowski Homework #3: Kinect-based Person Tracking with Simulated Countess Quanta Robot Introduction For this project, I used Microsoft Kinect hardware along with Microsoft’s for Windows ‘Kinect SDK v1.8’ to implement person tracking for a simulated Countess Quanta robot. The sample program included within the for Windows Developer Toolkit ‘SkeletonBasics-WPF’ ‘Kinect v1.8’ was extended to support this simulation. Skeleton positioning data was used to control the servo 10 neck rotation of the simulated robot, so that it would turn to face the tracked person. A simulated robot was used in place of the actual Countess Quanta robot, due to issues encountered while trying to install and utilize the Kinect hardware under the Ubuntu 12.04 operating system, which hosts the existing Countess Quanta motion control software. Purpose The intent of this project was to gain experience with the Kinect system and add basic Kinect support to the Countess Quanta robot that could be extended in the future. Person tracking was selected because it complements the existing voice synthesis and music playing functionality that has already been developed for the Countess Quanta robot. For instance, the person tracking feature could be used during interaction with a human by having the robot turn to face the person before speaking. Person tracking can also be used as a starting point to develop other functionality, such as gesture recognition, since the same underlying skeleton tracking methods in the SDK could be used.
Brad Pitney 12/11/2013 ECE 578 Perkowski Homework #3: Kinect-based Person Tracking with Simulated Countess Quanta Robot Introduction For this project, I used Microsoft Kinect hardware along with Microsoft’s ‘Kinect for Windows SDK v1.8’ to implement person tracking for a simulated Countess Quanta robot. The sample program ‘SkeletonBasics-WPF’ included within the ‘Kinect for Windows Developer Toolkit v1.8’ was extended to support this simulation. Skeleton positioning data was used to control the servo 10 neck rotation of the simulated robot, so that it would turn to face the tracked person. A simulated robot was used in place of the actual Countess Quanta robot, due to issues encountered while trying to install and utilize the Kinect hardware under the Ubuntu 12.04 operating system, which hosts the existing Countess Quanta motion control software. Purpose The intent of this project was to gain experience with the Kinect system and add basic Kinect support to the Countess Quanta robot that could be extended in the future. Person tracking was selected because it complements the existing voice synthesis and music playing functionality that has already been developed for the Countess Quanta robot. For instance, the person tracking feature could be used during interaction with a human by having the robot turn to face the person before speaking. Person tracking can also be used as a starting point to develop other functionality, such as gesture recognition, since the same underlying skeleton tracking methods in the SDK could be used.
2017_PROJ_13_Brad%20Pitney,Kinect-based%20PersonTracking.docx