Startup Idea: Automated Video Analysis for Robotic Joint Angles
I work in research; specifically, with robot joint actuation. We are testing a variety of things that a robot could pick up, like an apple or an egg. Our model is based on the human arm.
We are interested in finding out the angle of each joint with respect to time -- for example, how does the angle of the robot's "elbow" change when picking up an apple, or an egg?
Currently we are capturing video of the joint bending and manually measuring the angle on the computer screen. This is extremely time and labor intensive, since it involves pausing the video, measuring the angle of the joint, and playing the video again.
It is one of our huge bottlenecks, and a video 5 minutes long can take up to an 1 hour to label each and every joint (elbow, wrist, thumb, etc.) We also measure the angle every 1/2 second, so there are a lot of data points to take into account.
We have tried using sensors before, but they are too bulky and get in the way of the robot. We could try to use smaller sensors, but they are expensive.
We would pay for software to measure this angle. It would save a lot of time and quicken the pace of our research.
One possible solution would be to place bright green dots on the robot, and have some sort of software that would automatically see the dots and calculate the angle. For example, placing 3 dots near the elbow would allow it to (hopefully) measure the angle.
As we are mainly mechanical engineers, we have little software expertise and don't know if such software already exists, or if it would even be feasible to implement.
Other robot research groups across the country would probably find this useful as well, enlarging the market for this type of software.