What is Telepresence?
Telepresence is a set of technologies that allow a person to appear or act as if they were present in another location. Often times telepresence systems are geared towards a person’s senses to give them the sensation of actually being somewhere else. This can be achieved through many different technologies such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Telerobotics, etc. There are many practical applications for these types of systems such as space and marine exploration, military equipment, and medical surgery systems.
Project Summary
The goal of this project is to create a telerobotic system which allows a person to control a humanoid robot with the motion of his or her own body. To track the human movements, the Microsoft Kinect V2 motion sensing camera will be used, along with the Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit. This SDK provides the ability to utilize every aspect of the Kinect device such as voice control, skeleton tracking, and depth sensing. Using these tools, data about the human’s joints will be collected and sent to Aldebaran’s NAO V4 Robot using its own NAOqi Software Development Kit. This SDK provides access to the robot’s cameras, motors, speakers, voice recognition, etc.