KUKA LWR controlled by MS Kinect

This video demonstrates how a user can directly control the KUKA Light-weight Robot through a MS Kinect camera. The setup is shown at the HI11 fair at Messecenter Herning, Denmark, on the 6th-9th of September 2011. The setup is programmed entirely in ROS (www.ros.org). Transformations of the shoulder, elbow and hand are tracked directly from the Kinect camera using the openni_kinect driver. These are converted to joint values for the first 4 axes of the KUKA LWR, and fed to a simple P-controller developed specifically for this demo. The output of this controller is then sent to the KUKA controller through the Fast Research Interface. This is a preliminary step towards programming the robot by demonstration, a goal of both the EU-funded projects TAPAS and GISA. The setup is programmed by Oluf Skov Nielsen, Carsten Høilund and Mikkel Rath Pedersen, from the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Aalborg University, Denmark.