In July and August the work was focused on the completion of task 2 and task 3. At the end of August a meeting with our partners KUKA and Reis was held at the IPR[1], where the results of task 2 and 3 were presented. Also their role in the upcoming tasks 4 and 5 were discussed and defined. For the completion of the tasks 2 and 3, the still missing swept modelling and based on this the distance calculation were designed and implemented. Also a final system setup was created as a basis for the following tasks.   

In May and June the work was focused on the training of the classifier for the body part detection, and the build-up of the multi-camera setup including the implementation of the calibration and registration step. Unfortunately the training of the classifier did not deliver the expected results, so that the existing approach will be used for the ICP tracking. After the installation of the sensors in the experiment setup, and the implementation of the calibration and registration step, the sensor system now consists of 3 Kinect and one time-of-flight sensor.

In March and April, the work focused on the important task of human pose recognition based on an ICP[1] approach, and the environment modeling, done with the OpenGL framework. To improve the results of the ICP approach, a second method[2] will be incorporated in the estimation process. Therefore, a rendering pipeline has been implemented to produce synthetic data, which will be used for the training process of a classifier.

In January and February most of the work was put into the implementation of essential elements from the cognitive system, like the core software framework and the optical flow estimation module. The structure of the core framework strictly implements the idea of modular system design. Essential modules were programmed, performing the task of camera data streaming, visualization and optical flow estimation. The latter is a framework itself, providing the functionality of real time optical flow estimation based on the variational approach.

The work in 2011 was focused on defining requirements and characterizing components of the system,which will be used to carry out the experiments. In cooperation with our partners, Reis Robotics and KUKA, the experiments were discussed. As our partners are developers and manufacturers in the field of industrial robotics, there was  a lot of input on their behalf, which helped to refine our ideas for the experiments. Refinement in the sense of carrying out experiments which apply to existing human-robot-cooperation, as well as to scenarios which can be tagged as “something you want to have”.