Final Project Ideas

• Support for Kinect skeletons (Serene Han): Extend Tekkotsu's Kinect support to include the OpenNI skeleton tracking facility.
  
  
• Mirage support for Kinect (Mark Perez): Add depth imaging to the Mirage simulator so we can better simulate the Kinect.
  
  
• Face tracker (Andrew Sheng): Port the OpenCV face tracker to Tekkotsu and integrate it with the Lookout and MapBuilder.
  
  
• Accessibility (Bruce Hill and James Criscuolo): Develop enhancements to Tekkotsu to make it more usable by persons with disabilities, such as color blindness, low vision, or hearing impairment.
  
  
• Voice input (David Hamilton, Songdet Nillasithanukroh, and Jinxue Zhou): Provide voice input to Tekkotsu using an Android phone and Google's speech-to-text service, so the robot can respond to commands such as "move forward".
  
  
• Verbal instruction (Chase Brownell, Samuel Russell, and Kelsey Lee): Develop a language-based interface to the robot so humans can refer to things the robot perceives, shift its focus of attention, and command it to pick up objects.
  
  
• Object recognition (Elmer Garduno and Apoorv Khandelwal): Either port the SURF algorithm to Tekkotsu, or fix up the existing SIFT code and get it working reliably.
  
  
• Task planning (Andrew Bauer): Implement a combinatorial task, such as duplicating a pattern of objects, using Tekkotsu's interface to the FF task planner.
  
  

Additional Ideas for Next Year:

• Grasper enhancement: Extend the Grasper to support the Calliope5KP's 5-dof arm. Currently the Grasper only supports simpler arms and just a few types of actions. Additional actions might include stacking blocks, or arranging blocks into specific patterns.
  
  
• Calliope face: Construct a "face" for the Calliope robot using microservos to actuate lips, eyebrows, and/or ears, and LEDs to provide additional features.
  
  
• Robot cooperation: Develop a Mirage simulation in which two robots cooperate to perform a task.