Kinect-Powered Robot Lets You Clean Up Your House Remotely

squadMCU — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 04:43:24 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by squadMCU on 10/8/2021 4:43:24 AM

Yaskawa's SmartPal VII is perhaps not the friendliest looking (or most modern looking) mobile manipulation robot. It may also not be the smartest, but that's okay, since it's designed to be teleoperated, relying entirely on you to provide the brains.

No pressure.

Using a Kinect gesture interface and motion-tracking system, the SmartPal VII is perfectly suited to wander around your mom's house, "cleaning up" for her by snapping the necks of her stuffed animals like twigs at your command.

While the human is directly controlling the arms of the SmartPal VII with his arms, the rest of the motion of the robot (bending at the waist, base movement, and so forth) is all managed invisibly to the end user. So, if you want to remotely pick something up off the floor, you can just reach towards the floor, and the robot will drive forward and bend down as necessary. The bot is also capable of autonomous navigation to some degree, with gyros, infrared sensors, and what look to be a pair of LIDAR scanners at the front and back.

www.youtube.com/watch

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Tags: smartpal, yaskawa, robot, human_interaction, kinect