Kinect puppeting
I am working on using Kinect skeleton tracking to control a PR2 and manipulate objects in Gazebo. I want an end result similar to Garratt Gallagher's Teleoperation, but he (and I believe Willow Garage) are both using Cartesian coordinate mapping to "puppet", I want joint angle mapping. This will initially control all the joints in both arms, except the forearm roll and writs joints, although I'd eventually like to get finger tracking for grasping detection (Like the MIT examples). Of course it will need to avoid self and environment collisions and unattainable joint angles. Since somewhat I'm new to ROS, I have a few questions to get started:
1) Is anyone working on something similar? Is the code available?
2) Since this will involve lots of vector and trigonometry, what library should I use for such math?
3) What is and outline for the best way to implement safe joint angle control?
Note: I'm currently using Fuerte on Ubuntu 12.04 with an Xbox Kinect. Thank you!
