Today I talk about the internship I made from the middle of October (2011) to the middle of January (2012). I'll start by presenting a little the context, and what I have done exactly.
I worked at Aldebaran Robotics on NAO. The goal of my internship was to refactor a blob of code that allows NAO to recharging himself by going to its station. The behavior was developed in Python, and my goal was to build the same thing in C++. Here is the video that shows this behavior:
Pretty cool right? You can guess how excited I was to attack a project like this, and I start by analyzing the existing program to understand what are the keys to make it works in C++. And then, we (my supervisor and I) realized that we could build a better framework to track one or several object(s). We designed an architecture (what are the modules and their responsibilities), and (because my supervisor was great) I was responsible of the whole architecture: what are the objects, how they interact, etc. I develop all by myself and building a set of libraries that allows the user to build a tracker. The aim of the whole project was to being able to propose a set of tracker (a red ball tracker, an Aldebaran logo tracker, …) with as less duplication as possible, and we also wanted to let the user create its own kind of tracker by adding its own little brick of software. This was a success since one of my supervisor developed a face tracker in 20 minutes and 160 lines of code. I created a tool able to track one or two objects. When working with one object, NAO was able to follow an object with its head, or its whole body and staying at a given distance of the object. When there is two objects he is able to go to an exact position in a repair defined by the center of the two objects. A good tracker is also able to detect when it losts its target. Our tool starts by looking at the last place he saw it.
I think it is better if I don't go too much in details about this project since I don't owe its right. But here is what it looks like in video (yes I have asked for the rights for that :P).
In the first part of the video, I show the search of a red ball, and how it finds and follows it.
In the second part, it tracks the (kind of) pie-charts on the box, and go to the left red cross on the floor. He doesn't look at the floor, the red cross is just for us to see that it goes where we asked for!
And the last part was a reproduction of the charging station, just for seeing that we are able to reproduce it with my work. You'll see that it seems to stop. In fact he does because he reaches the first target, and I had to run through my computer to tell him to go to the second!
No more suspense, let's look at the video!
I feel like some personages in cartoons because you see my hand, my foot, my body, but never my head :-P
Feel free to ask if you have any questions about that, I'll be happy to answer.
Nao makes a lot of noise !
ReplyDeleteI thought it was more discreet when moving...
I have to admit that it was pretty annoying.
DeleteI don't know if someone changed that since January... I hope so!