Intelligent User Interface for Roombots

Abstract

Roombots are modular robots developed at EPFL in the Biorobotics Laboratory. In the past years different user interfaces were designed to interact with them but there is still room for improvement. The aim of this project was to develop a novel approach to control these robots using a gesture based interface. First we used the RGB camera of a Kinect to detect the position of connectors that Roombots use to make displacements. We converted this information to a 3D graphical representation that shows the position of obstacles and connectors on a rectangular platform. Unfortunately due to lack of time and some unexpected problems we could not finish the detection of Roombots modules and therefore the user interface but the evaluation of the connector detection algorithm showed robustness to many parameters such as the size of connectors seen by the Kinect, the position of connectors, or their deformation due to perspective.

Report and Presentation slides