Background

When robots engage humans in natural circumstances, it is important that a robot recognizes the human in front of him. The recognition can be vision or voice based, but this assignment should concentrate on the shape of the human.

Assignment

Images courtesy of Aldebaran Robotics and Hokuyo Automatic Cooperation Ltd.

In our laboratory is a small humanoid robot, Nao, equiped with a laserscanner on top of its head. By bending his body, the Nao can make a full 3D scan of the space in front of him. It is the task of the student to apply machine learning techniques on this point cloud and to detect if a human is front of the robot and classify this human in broad categories (adult/child, male/female).

References

• Aleksandr V. Segal, Dirk Haehnel, Sebastian Thrun, Generalized-ICP, Robotics: Science and Systems 2009 PDF.
• Rob Suikerbuik, Hans Tangelder, Hein Daanen, Aernout Oudenhuijzen, Automatic Feature Detection in 3D Human Body Scans, SAE Digital human modeling for design and engineering conference, June 15-17, 2004, Rochester. PDF