Development of Kinectᵀᴿ applications for assembly simulation and ergonomic analysis

Marker-less motion capture technology has been harnessed for several years to track human movements for developing various applications. Recently, with the launch of Microsoft Kinect, researchers have been keenly interested in developing applications using this device. Since Kinect is very inexpensive (only $110 at the time of writing this thesis), it is a low-cost and a promising substitute for the comparatively expensive marker-based motion capture systems. Though it is principally designed for home entertainment, numerous applications can be developed with the capabilities of Kinect. The skeleton data of a human being tracked by a single Kinect device is enough to simulate the human movements, in some cases. However, it is highly desirable to develop a multiple Kinect system to enhance the tracking volume and to address an issue of occlusions. This thesis presents a novel approach for addressing the issue of interference of infrared light patterns while using multiple Kinect devices for human motion capture without lowering the frame rate. This research also presents a software solution to obtain skeleton data from multiple Kinect devices using Kinect for Windows SDK. It also discusses the development of an application involving auto scaling of a human model in digital human modeling software by Siemens Jack and human motion simulation using skeleton tracking data from Kinect to assist the industries with a flexible tool for ergonomic analysis. Further, the capability of this application for obtaining assembly simulations of fastening operations on an aircraft fuselage is also presented. --Abstract, page iii