Construction of a Computer Vision Test Platform: VISART for Facial Recognition in Social Robotics

Robotics has undoubtedly found its way deeper into every day human tasks up to the point where now they even share workspaces with people. In this context, social robotics has increased its field of action, one important part is the advances in aspects that make up the Human-Machine Interaction. This article reports the advance that an investigation team at Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas ESPE has done to create a test platform for Computer Vision algorithms. This approach consists of a 3-DOF articulated robotic head with anthropomorphic characteristics, considering the guidelines established by different authors for social robotics, besides it provides affordable, flexible and scalable hardware resources to facilitate the implementation, testing, analysis and development of different stereo artificial vision algorithms. The system, called Visart, is intended to work in more natural situations than independent cameras, therefore, work deeply in Human-Robot Interaction. As the first report of the Visart prototype, some basic tests with the platform were performed, they consist of face detection, facial and expression recognition, object tracking, and object distance calculation. The results obtained were consistent, opening a door for further research focusing on the comparison of more computer vision algorithms to examine their performance in real scenarios and evaluate them more naturally with our prototype for Human-Robot Interaction.