Human-Following Robot with Kinect - Hackster.io

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Instead of using single camera and complicated image recognition algorithms we can take advantage of Kinect libraries.

Read up about this project on “Human-Following Robot with Kinect”)

Human-Following Robot with Kinect

Turtle Rover

68 15,688

• Overview

• Things

• Story

• Introduction

• Preparing Kinect to work

• Testing Kinect

• Integrating Kinect with mobile platform

• Credits

• Comments(3)

68

Team Turtle Rover: Leo Rover team, Marcin Twardak

Published August 10, 2017 © CC BY-NC

Human-Following Robot with Kinect

Instead of using single camera and complicated image recognition algorithms we can take advantage of Kinect libraries.

IntermediateFull instructions provided8 hours15,962

[

](https://www.hackster.io/workshops/ultra96)

Our Turbocharge Python w/ Ultra96 PYNQ course is now available. Buy it now!

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Things used in this project

Hardware components

Microsoft Kinect Sensor

×

1

• Buy from Newark
• Buy from www.gamestop.com

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

×

1

• Buy from Newark
• Buy from Adafruit
• Buy from CPC
• Buy from ModMyPi
• Buy from SparkFun

Kinect USB Adapter

×

1

Turtle Rover

×

1

Software apps and online services

ROS Robot Operating System

RViz

Story

Introduction

Microsoft Kinect is a popular, and relatively cheap device, which has multiple applications both in amateur and professional robotics. One of the cases is man-following robot. Instead of using single camera and complicated image recognition algorithms we can take advantage of already-established Kinect libraries.

Preparing Kinect to work

Official libraries are designed only for Microsoft Windows, but fortunately we have a strong community of developers and they ported most of the functionality to Linux. What’s more they work with ARM processors, therefore we can even use the popular minicomputer Raspberry Pi!

The easiest way to implement these libraries is to use ROS – Robot Operating System. Installation is quite straightforward and is described here - http://wiki.ros.org/ROSberryPi/Installing%20ROS%20Indigo%20on%20Raspberry%20Pi

The next thing to do is to figure out how the ‘looks-like-USB’ Microsoft Kinect connector works. Basically it’s USB combined with 12 V power supply. To connect the sensor to a Raspberry Pi you will need the adapter from the photo and then modify it to your power output.

USB Adapter for Kinect

Testing Kinect

If you have the access to the computer with any Linux distro, you can use RViz software to visualize data from Kinect.

Body joints visible in RViz

The next step into taking control of our robot with Kinect is to read the position of the human body in 3 dimensions. Below you can find an example piece of code:

#!/ usr/bin/env python
import roslib
import rospy
import tf
import os
def cls () :
    os. system ('clear ')
import numpy as np
if __name__ == '__main__ ':
    rospy . init_node (' kinect_listener ', anonymous = True )
    listener = tf. TransformListener ()
    rate = rospy . Rate (10.0) 
    while not rospy . is_shutdown () : 
        try: 
        cls ()
        (trans , rot) = listener . lookupTransform ('/ torso_1 ','/ openni_link ', rospy . Time (0) )
        rospy . loginfo (" Torso coordinates :\n\n")
        rospy . loginfo ("\t\tX = {0:f}". format ( trans [0]) )
        rospy . loginfo ("\t\tY = {0:f}". format ( trans [1]) )
        rospy . loginfo ("\t\tZ = {0:f}". format ( trans [2]) )
    except (tf. LookupException , tf. ConnectivityException , tf. ExtrapolationException ):
        continue
    rate . sleep ()

And here is the result visible in the console:

Torso coordinates

Integrating Kinect with mobile platform

The last thing which we have to do is to connect our sensor with a robot. At first we’ve connected it to the simple, three-wheel platform:

Three-wheel platform with Kinect

Later on, to take full advantage of the system, we mounted it on the serious mobile platform – Turtle Rover. We used the built-in Raspberry Pi and provided power supply.

Now it looks nice and clean and can be used everywhere!

Want more? Check out what Turtle can do!

• www.turtlerover.com

• www.facebook.com/TurtleRover

Read more)

Credits

Leo Rover team

5 projects • 22 followers

Leo Rover - a Robotics Development Kit to finally make all your ideas come to reality.

Follow ContactContact

Marcin Twardak

1 project • 10 followers

Follow ContactContact

Thanks to Marcin Twardak.

Comments

Please confirm your email before commenting. Haven’t received a confirmation email? Resend. Contact us at help@hackster.io for help.

Md. Khairul Alam

3 years ago

;)

• Report

Nice

• Thank;)

James Kruse

3 years ago

;)

• Report

Oh this looks cool

• Thank;)

Night R

5 months ago

;)

• Report

Awesome Rover with high performance depth camera

• Thank;)

[

](https://www.hackster.io/workshops/ultra96)

Our Turbocharge Python w/ Ultra96 PYNQ course is now available. Buy it now!

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• _zYy6t4fL2o.png?auto=compress%2Cformat&w=40&h=40&fit=fillmax&bg=fff#alt=)

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