Follow-me with ADBSCAN, Gesture and Audio Control#

This demo of the Follow-me algorithm shows a Autonomous Mobile Robot application for following a target person where the movement of the robot can be controlled by the person’s location, hand gestures as well as audio command. The entire pipeline diagram can be found in the Simulation Demos page.

It takes point cloud sensor (2D Lidar/depth camera) as well as RGB camera image as inputs. These inputs are passed through Intel®-patented Adaptive DBScan and a deep-learning-based gesture recognition pipeline, respectively to publish motion command messages for a differential drive robot. It also takes recorded audio commands for starting and stopping the robot movement. Moreover, the demo is equipped with a text-to-speech synthesis model to narrate the robot’s activity over the course of its movement.

This demo has been tested and validated on 13th Generation Intel® Core™ processors with Intel® Iris® Xe Integrated Graphics and 12th Generation Intel® Core™ processors with Intel® Iris® Xe Integrated Graphics. This tutorial describes how to launch the demo in the Gazebo simulator.

Getting Started#

Prerequisites#

Complete the get started guide before continuing.

Install the Deb packages#

Install ros-jazzy-followme-turtlebot3-gazebo and ros-jazzy-text-to-speech-pkg Deb packages from Intel® Autonomous Mobile Robot APT repository. ros-jazzy-followme-turtlebot3-gazebo is the wrapper package for the demo which will install all of the dependencies in the backend.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ros-jazzy-followme-turtlebot3-gazebo ros-jazzy-text-to-speech-pkg

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ros-humble-followme-turtlebot3-gazebo ros-humble-text-to-speech-pkg

Activate Python Virtual Environment#

sudo apt install python3-venv
python3 -m venv venv_followme_audio
cd venv_followme_audio
source bin/activate

Install Python Modules#

This application uses Mediapipe Hands Framework for hand gesture recognition. Install the following modules as a prerequisite for the framework:

pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install pyyaml
pip3 install -r /opt/ros/jazzy/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/requirements_audio_jazzy.txt

pip3 install --upgrade pip
pip3 install pyyaml
pip3 install -r /opt/ros/humble/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/requirements_audio_humble.txt

Run Demo with 2D Lidar#

Please make sure to source the /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash file at first before executing any command in a new terminal. You can get more details in Prepare the Target System page.

Run the following script to launch Gazebo simulator and ROS 2 rviz2.

sudo chmod +x /opt/ros/jazzy/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/demo_lidar_audio.sh
/opt/ros/jazzy/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/demo_lidar_audio.sh

sudo chmod +x /opt/ros/humble/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/demo_lidar_audio.sh
/opt/ros/humble/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/demo_lidar_audio.sh

You will see two panels side-by-side: Gazebo GUI on the left and ROS 2 rviz display on the right.

follow_me_demo_gazebo_rviz

  • The green square robot is a guide robot (namely, the target), which will follow a pre-defined trajectory.

  • The gray circular robot is a TurtleBot3 robot, which will follow the guide robot.

    TurtleBot3 robot is equipped with a 2D Lidar and an RealSense™ Depth Camera. In this demo, the 2D Lidar is selected as the point cloud input.

In this demo, we used a pre-defined trajectory for the guide robot and published gesture image as well as pre-recorded audio at different points of time to show start, follow and stop activities of the TurtleBot3 robot.

After the command is executed, you will view that the guide robot starts moving towards TurtleBot3 robot. To start the TurtleBot3 robot, condition 1 and either one of the conditions 2 or 3 from the following list needs to be true:

  1. The target (guide robot) is located within the tracking radius of the TurtleBot3 robot. Radius is a reconfigurable parameter in: /opt/ros/jazzy/share/adbscan_ros2_follow_me/config/adbscan_sub_2D.yaml).

    In ROS 2 Humble, the file is located at the similar directory path.

  2. The gesture (visualized in the /image topic in ROS 2 rviz2) of the target is thumbs up.

  3. The detected audio from the recording is Start Following.

The stop condition for the TurtleBot3 robot is fulfilled when any one of the following conditions holds true:

  1. The target (guide robot) moves to a distance of more than the tracking radius of the TurtleBot3 robot. Radius is a reconfigurable parameter in: /opt/ros/jazzy/share/adbscan_ros2_follow_me/config/adbscan_sub_2D.yaml.

    In ROS 2 Humble, the file is located at the similar directory path.

  2. The gesture (visualized in the /image topic in ROS 2 rviz2) of the target is thumbs down.

  3. The detected audio from the recording is Stop Following.

The demo will narrate the detected gesture, audio and target location during the start and stop activity of the TurtleBot3 robot.

Note:

The current version of the demo only supports Start, Stop, Start Following and Stop Following audio commands. If the detected audio does not match any of the supported commands, the audio control will be ignored and the movement of the robot will be determined by the remaining criteria. Similarly, hand gesture control will be ignored if it does not match thumbs up or thumbs down. Thereby, any undesired manipulation of the robot is blocked.

Run Demo with RealSense™ Camera#

Please make sure to source the /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash file (or /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash) at first before executing any command in a new terminal. You can get more details in Prepare the Target System page.

Run the following script to launch Gazebo simulator and ROS 2 rviz2.

sudo chmod +x /opt/ros/jazzy/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/demo_RS_audio.sh
/opt/ros/jazzy/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/demo_RS_audio.sh

sudo chmod +x /opt/ros/humble/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/demo_RS_audio.sh
/opt/ros/humble/share/followme_turtlebot3_gazebo/scripts/demo_RS_audio.sh

You will see two panels side-by-side: Gazebo GUI on the left and ROS 2 rviz display on the right.

follow_me_demo_gazebo_rviz

After the command is executed, you will observe similar behavior of the TurtleBot3 robot and guide robot in the Gazebo GUI as in Run Demo with 2D Lidar.

There are reconfigurable parameters in the /opt/ros/jazzy/share/adbscan_ros2_follow_me/config/ directory for both LIDAR (adbscan_sub_2D.yaml) and RealSense™ camera (adbscan_sub_RS.yaml).

The user can modify the parameters depending on the respective robot, sensor configuration and environments (if required) before running the tutorial. Find a brief description of the parameters in the following list:

  • Lidar_type

    Type of the point cloud sensor. For RealSense™ camera and LIDAR inputs, the default value is set to RS and 2D, respectively.

  • Lidar_topic

    Name of the topic publishing point cloud data.

  • Verbose

    If this flag is set to True, the locations of the detected target objects will be printed as the screen log.

  • subsample_ratio

    This is the downsampling rate of the original point cloud data. Default value = 15 (i.e. every 15-th data in the original point cloud is sampled and passed to the core ADBSCAN algorithm).

  • x_filter_back

    Point cloud data with x-coordinate > x_filter_back are filtered out (positive x direction lies in front of the robot).

  • y_filter_left, y_filter_right

    Point cloud data with y-coordinate > y_filter_left and y-coordinate < y_filter_right are filtered out (positive y-direction is to the left of robot and vice versa).

  • z_filter

    Point cloud data with z-coordinate < z_filter will be filtered out. This option will be ignored in case of 2D Lidar.

  • Z_based_ground_removal

    Filtering in the z-direction will be applied only if this value is non-zero. This option will be ignored in case of 2D Lidar.

  • base, coeff_1, coeff_2, scale_factor

    These are the coefficients used to calculate adaptive parameters of the ADBSCAN algorithm. These values are pre-computed and recommended to keep unchanged.

  • init_tgt_loc

    This value describes the initial target location. The person needs to be at a distance of init_tgt_loc in front of the robot to initiate the motor.

  • max_dist

    This is the maximum distance that the robot can follow. If the person moves at a distance > max_dist, the robot will stop following.

  • min_dist

    This value describes the safe distance the robot will always maintain with the target person. If the person moves closer than min_dist, the robot stops following.

  • max_linear

    Maximum linear velocity of the robot.

  • max_angular

    Maximum angular velocity of the robot.

  • max_frame_blocked

    The robot will keep following the target for max_frame_blocked number of frames in the event of a temporary occlusion.

  • tracking_radius

    The robot will keep following the target as long as the current target location = previous location +/- tracking_radius

Troubleshooting#

  • Failed to install Deb package: Please make sure to run sudo apt update before installing the necessary Deb packages.

  • Please make sure to prepare your environment before executing ROS 2 commands in a new terminal. You can find the instructions in the Prepare the Target System page.

  • You can stop the demo anytime by pressing ctrl-C. If the Gazebo simulator freezes or does not stop, please use the following command in a terminal:

    sudo killall -9 gazebo gzserver gzclient

  • We used simpleaudio python library to playback audio. The necessary dependencies are installed in the install prerequisite libraries step.

    Please make sure that the system microphones are available and unmuted in order to listen to played audio during the demo.