Neopixel Rings for Robot State Visualization
Bachelor-Thesis at group TAMS
Motivation
Most robots designed for human-robot interaction tasks are
provided with either an actual humanoid head
or at least with a display that mimics eyes.
Using either fixed or online-generated animations of eyes
and facial expressions, this allows the software to provide
natural feedback of the current robot state.
On the other hand, the robot platforms available at group TAMS,
including the PR2 and TASER mobile robots
are optimized towards manipulation capabilities and currently
lack any means of visual feedback of internal robot state.
This hinders human-robot interaction tasks, as the user has no
idea of the current mode or any planned motions before the
robot actually starts to move.
As proven by the iCub platform, even a few simple LEDs can help
a lot to provide visual feedback or the current robot state
and its ``mood''.
Where the iCub uses artifical eyebrows for the feedback,
this thesis will study the use of Neopixel LEDs for visualization
of the internal robot.
As each Neopixel LED can display a different color,
both technically oriented (hardware/software component working/broken)
and socially renderings (happy, angry, surprised) can be rendered.
For the PR2, the initial plan is to install two Neopixel LED rings
around the eyes (actually cameras) of the robot head.
Thesis Goals:
- Arduino-based control of two Neopixel ring displays,
- host based software to control the displays in real-time,
- develop ideas on how to visualize internal robot state using the displays,
- design and implement a library of basic state displays,
- perhaps a short user-study to test acceptance of the visualizations,
- using the ROS open-source framework and environment
Requirements
- as always, interest in the topic area, here visualization of robot state and mood
- basic knowledge of the ROS framework
- programming skills in Python or C/C++ and Qt
Contact
