Tomasz Tomanek's Mariola Is an NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Arduino-Powered Mimic Robot

Strike a pose and Mariola will do its best to follow, using a resnet18-body model running directly on its Jetson Nano "brain."

Polish developer Tomasz Tomanek has used an NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB to built a robot, Mariola, capable of mimicking the posture and movements of a human, based on PoseNet models running on-device.

"Mariola is a home made robot unit buil[t] to learn about the basics of robotic mechanics, behavior, and to experiment with human-robot interactions," Tomanek explains. "[It uses a] Jetson Nano 2GB as a 'brain' to control the Mariola robot. Mariola uses a pose detection machine learning model, which allows them to mimic the poses it sees."

Mariola packs a Jetson Nano to watch you pose and mimic what you're doing. (πŸ“Ή: Tomasz Tomanek)

The Mariola robot base itself was originally built two years ago, offering an omniwheel-based platform with an Arduino Nano controller. Initially, Tomanek started working with the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer and TensorFlow β€” but realized better performance could be achieved using the Jetson Nano and taking advantage of NVIDIA's library of pre-trained models.

"The first part is to use the Jetson with the [Raspberry Pi Camera Module] v2.1 equipped [with a] 160Β° lens to get the image. The image is then used as an input to the pose recognition network model resnet18-body.

"If pose data are available, particular points (joints) coordinates are gathered (elbows, arm joint, hands) and [the] position of those in relative space (in relation to the size of the person in frame) is calculated.Having this coordinates, the inverse kinematic model for the hands is used to determine each robot hand joints' angles."

Each section of the robot is built as a separate subsystem, communicating with the Jetson Nano over a CAN bus β€” including its NeoPixel animated face. The source code for the mimicry project has been published to GitHub under an unspecified open source license; Mariola itself is available on a separate repository under the GNU General Public License 3.

Additional information is available on NVIDIA's Developer blog, where Mariola the mimic has been picked as the Jetson Project of the Month.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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