One of the capabilities of most service and social robots is face detection and tracking. These robots can identify faces and track head movements. There are numerous implementations of face detection and tracking systems on the web. Most trackers have a pan-and-tilt mechanism, and a camera is mounted on the top of the servos. In this chapter, we will see a simple tracker that only has a pan mechanism. We are going to use a USB webcam mounted on an AX-12 Dynamixel servo. Controlling the Dynamixel servo and image processing are done in ROS.
In this chapter, we will begin by first configuring Dynamixel AX-12 servos and then interfacing Dynamixel with ROS. We will then create face-tracker ROS packages. By the end of this chapter, we will have learned how to work with the face-tracking ROS package.
The following topics...