Inspiration
After spending countless hours volunteering at children's hospitals, I have noticed that the biggest problem that the children face is a lack of interaction. Many of these hospitals are understaffed and do not have the personnel needed to interact with the children for several hours of the day, which is extremely important for their social development. We wanted to try and ameliorate this problem by creating a robot which creates a light, dancing exercise session with the patients.
What it does
The robot is programmed with two modes: freestyle and routine.
In the routine mode, the robot performs a series dance moves with its arms and the objective is for the patient to follow along and mimic the same moves. The accuracy of the patient's moves is computed using input from a Kinect sensor. Essentially, it gives the patient an engaging way to exercise that doesn't cause much exertion and allows them to complete the exercise from their bed or wheelchair. The freestyle mode allows the patient to dance to their own choreography to music of their choice and the robot then mimics the patients' dancing. We believe that this allows the children to express themselves which is something that they would not normally have the opportunity to pursue from the confines of their bed.
How I built it
We made use of Kinect SDK to be able to properly input data read in from the Kinect sensor. C++ was used to write all of the code required for data processing. C was used to write the instructions to the Arduino processor. The Arduino was connected to the robot via a breadboard.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge we had to tackle was the integration of heavy data processing on Kinect input with a small processor like the Arduino where we had to balance performance and accuracy of the system, with consideration of speed. In addition, the hardware did not consistently respond which was a large challenge in itself.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We were proud to have built a robot that tackles a real-world problem on the first time that we attempted a hardware hack.
What I learned
We learned a lot about the how to go about approaching a hardware hack.
What's next for The Joy of Dance
We would like to increase the robot's accuracy by increasing the capacity of the microprocessor.
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