The Bridge between Xsens Motion-Capture and Robot Operating System (ROS): Enabling Robots with Online 3D Human Motion Tracking

With the growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments, the ability of such systems to perceive, understand, and anticipate human behavior becomes increasingly important [1]. In particular, the constant and accurate tracking of human motion is a key skill for robots to coexist, interact, cooperate with, or imitate humans [2]. The resulting applications are countless, ranging from surveillance, navigation, and teleoperation, to those involving physical human-robot interaction and collaboration. Essentially, motion can be recorded by tracking the precise position and orientation of points of interest at high frequency. Different physical principles can be exploited for this purpose.