Monthly Archives: June 2013

Development, Education

Robot Photographer (Part II)

A new milestone for the robot photographer! Here's a list of new things that the robot is capable of:

  • It has been taught to detect and track humans in Kinect's depth image!
  • Depth and photographic cameras have been aligned (camera intrinsics and extrinsics have been calibrated). This effectively means that given a point on one image plane (e.g. in the depth image), a robot is able to tell where the corresponding point would be on the other image plane (e.g. in a photograph).
  • Composition and framing modules have been implemented, i.e. now the robot knows how a "good" picture looks like.

All in all, this means that the "beta" version of the robot is now fully functional. Here's a new video of it in action!

Robot photographer development: human head tracking and picture framing

Next step: real world deployment!

 
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Development, Education

Robot Photographer (Part I)

For a few weeks now I have been working on a new idea: an autonomous robot photographer.

My ultimate goal is to build a fully autonomous robot which could take well-composed pictures in various social events: conferences, open days, weddings and so on.

In the process I am also hoping to build a scalable system that could be extended to more complicated tasks and, potentially, used as a teaching tool at an undergraduate level.

I am planning to open-source both the software and the construction details, therefore I am using only widely accessible and inexpensive parts, and only open-source software.

My preliminary "ingredients" list for the robot includes:

  • a Microsoft Kinect sensor to detect humans and avoid obstacles in the environment,
  • a cheap point-and-shoot camera for taking the actual pictures, and
  • a Turtlebot spec compliant Kobuki robot base for the actual locomotion.

I will update the blog with more development details, but in the meantime, here's a video of the first development milestone: an autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance.

Robot photographer development: obstacle avoidance

 
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