Action Cue Assistant

Advanced AutonomyIntermediate Robotics plus perception pipelines, control loops, coordinate frames, and real-time behavior.

Before you start

  • Complete Camera Module
  • Understand body keypoints, confidence thresholds, and short motion histories
  • Use an instructor-approved pose or action model

Build a camera project that recognizes a small set of actions such as wave, stop, and point, then reports the matching response.

Project Outcome

The first version prints the detected action and confidence. A later supervised version can map actions to lights or other instructor-approved robot behavior.

Camera Input

  • Upper-body keypoints or tracked joint positions
  • A short history of keypoint movement
  • Detection confidence and target visibility

Build Stages

  1. Capture frames and confirm the person remains visible.
  2. Record or obtain body keypoints from an approved perception model.
  3. Define one action using a small, explainable rule.
  4. Store recent observations in a fixed-length history.
  5. Add confidence and cooldown rules to prevent repeated triggers.
  6. Print the selected response without moving the robot.

First Prototype

Recognize wave and stop. Print hello for a wave and motion inhibited for a stop gesture.

What To Measure

  • Correct actions versus false triggers
  • Recognition delay
  • Minimum useful confidence
  • Performance when a hand or arm is briefly hidden

Extensions

  • Add pointing direction.
  • Display keypoints and confidence over the image.
  • Compare rule-based recognition with a small temporal classifier.
  • Add a supervised light response after the camera-only version is reliable.

Safety Boundary

Keep the first prototype camera-only. Gesture recognition must never be the only emergency-stop mechanism, and generated code must not initiate robot motion.