Making Things See

Forward Kinematics

We’ll start off this chapter with the forward kinematics approach. We’ll use the Kinect skeleton data to find the location of our user’s shoulder, elbow, and hand. Then we’ll calculate the angles between these joints. The joint angles are the values we’ll want to send to our Arduino so that it can match them with the servos in our robot arm. Before we get into building our circuit, assembling our robot arm, or programming our Arduino, we’ll start with the most familiar part of the project: the Processing sketch that uses SimpleOpenNI to calculate the joint angles. Then we’ll proceed to add on these more advanced pieces of the project one at a time.

Calculating the Angles of Limbs

Let’s get started by putting together a Processing ...