DaNI-K: A Vision-based Robot Control Experiment with a DaNI Robot and Kinect Sensor Bundle

This work describes an implementation of a vision-based robot control experiment using a DaNI-K robot consisting of a DaNI 2.0 robot and a Kinect for Xbox 360 motion sensor package as a part of an upper-level required undergraduate mechatronics engineering robotics course. DaNI-K was created to be the next level robotic platform in comparison to the popular Mindstorms NXT robotic system. DaNI 2.0 is a 3-wheeled pre-assembled mobile robot based on National Instruments’ Single-Board Reconfigurable I/O (sbRIO) and Pitsco Education’s TETRIX Building System. SbRIO is an embedded control and acquisition board consisting of a real-time processor, an FPGA, and a number of I/O’s that can be programmed in LabVIEW, a graphical programming language. The TETRIX Building System is a kit of aluminum parts, DC motors, gears, and wheels for building robotic hardware platforms. Kinect for Xbox 360 (Kinect) is a popular motion sensor package for the Xbox 360 video game console from Microsoft consisting of a 3D camera (depth sensor), color camera, and an array of microphones. The experiment included two tasks. The first task was to install all the necessary software and program the DaNI robot to perform obstacle detection and avoidance using its ultrasonic sensor. The second task was to improve the obstacle detection and avoidance capabilities of the DaNI robot by adding another computer connected to a Kinect sensor. Working in pairs and as a collective, students were able to complete the two tasks, develop their design/programming skills, and learn about some complexities of “real” engineering projects. In addition, they gained a better understanding of sensors and their applications including sensor fusion.