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I am not sure if this has been tried before but I am trying to use Kinect and detect gestures made by the Nao robot.

I have made a Kinect application, a gesture based picture viewer and it detects humans fine(Obviously it does!) What I wanted to try was (lazy as I am), to see if I could use some (say, voice) command to tell the Nao to do a Swipe Right gesture and have my application identify that gesture. The Nao can easily identify my command and do some gesture. The problem however is, when I put the Nao in front of the Kinect sensor, the Kinect does not track it.

What I want to know is, are there some basics behind Kinect's human body motion tracking that essentially fails when a robot is placed in front of it instead of a human?

PS: I have kept the Nao at the right distance from the sensor. I have also checked if the entire robot is in the field of view of the sensor.

Mark Booth
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Karan Thakkar
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  • Try placing the Nao with its arms extended, as in the Leonardo Man drawings. The "right distance" for the robot may not be the same as for a human. Also, using near mode may be applicable. – Nicholas Pappas Oct 25 '12 at 22:06
  • sorry my ignorance, whats "Nao"? – Ewerton Oct 25 '12 at 23:03
  • @EvilClosetMonkey I tried changing the distances with its arms stretched and then removed myself from the view, but still it did not detect Nao. I am beginning to wonder if its even possible. – Karan Thakkar Oct 26 '12 at 04:10
  • @Ewerton [I love google](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nao_(robot)) – Karan Thakkar Oct 26 '12 at 04:12
  • I wouldn't be surprised if the skeleton tracker has some assumptions of size associated with it. It might see the Nao's joints, but realize that nobody is really that tiny so it just ignores the robot. I'll see what I have of similar size to try out tomorrow or early next week. – Nicholas Pappas Oct 26 '12 at 04:21
  • Yeah, please do that and let me know what you come up with. – Karan Thakkar Oct 26 '12 at 04:23
  • For those with access to the (currently private) [Robotics](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40020/robotics) beta, this question has been [multi-posted there](http://robotics.stackexchange.com/q/148/37). – Mark Booth Oct 26 '12 at 17:12
  • Yes but I wasnt sure if I should share that link. – Karan Thakkar Oct 27 '12 at 12:32

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The NAO Robot doesn't have the same proportion as a human, and moreover its size is not of an human being (too short). For those reason, classic skeleton detection doesn't detect NAO as a human.

To do that you should take a current skeleton detection, than change threshold and constants. Sadly I don't hear about that kind of algorithm being opensource...

Just let me know...

Alexandre Mazel
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