picture Doctoral researcher
Mechanical Engineering Department
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Contact

Mailing address
Mechanical Engineering Department - PMA Division
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Celestijnenlaan 300B
postbusnr.: 2420
B-3001 Leuven, Belgium

Contact info
koen_dot_buys_at_mech_dot_kuleuven_dot_be
Phone: ++32 16 32 80 59
Office: 01.053

Research

  • What?

  • Real-time markerless motion analysis

    In this project the human motion is analysed in real-time with visual input of a camera system without the need of placing markers on the person. The project is divided in packages: We start with a literature studie to analyse the current 'state-of-the-art' in the different domains. The image-processing package searchs for suitable visual patterns to do person-detection and extraction. It also looks into which possibilities there exist externally to aid this process. The motion-analysis/modelling package is divided in two parts, the first constructs a kinematic and dynamic motionmodel of a human. It will search for a balance in the contradicting relation between a person-based model that implements as much features as possible and a model that keeps the dimensionality low. The second part reconstructs the person based on the data of the image-processing. The embedded and real-time visualisation package handles both the translation of the algorithm to an embedded system and handles also the useability of the user-interface. Implementation and validation happens with two case-studies: the first is the gait-analysis of revalidating persons and the second is the cooperation between a flexible industrial robotassistent and a human.

    Human Motion Capturing Model
  • Why?

  • The economical finality of the research is both in the medical sector as in Industrial implementations. In the medical sector we think of improving the Ergonomics in a gait-analysis lab, the guidance of revalidating people and to Support the construction of better orthoses. In the industrial sector the research closely relates to the strategic research Agenda put up by the European Industry in the fields of: human-machine Interaction, learning by example, security of robots working in a close Environment with humans.

  • Acknowledgements
    • Financial support by K.U.Leuven's Concerted Research Action and GOA/2010/011 Global real-time optimal control of autonomous robots and mechatronic systems
    • Willow Garage for having me as a research intern and mentoring me
    • PCL developers for guiding me and giving advice
    • Nvidia for supporting me with a research stipend
    • Itseez for giving me code support
    • Amazon for giving me an AWS Research and Education Grant
    • Google for having me as a GSOC mentor
    • Everybody in my lab for the fun discussions


  • Past Research

    • 6DoF Inertial-Visual SLAM
    • Small Size League Robocup Robots: RoboCup.be

Teaching

Currently assigned to the following courses as TA:

  • Beweging (H01N1a)
  • Embedded Control Systems
Was assigned before:

  • Meetsystemen (H01N1a)
  • Advanced Robot Control Systems (H06U9A) WIKI
  • Advanced and sustainable embedded control systems
  • Computer Networks
  • Advanced Computer Hardware
Also "exam-ombudsman" for master students in mechanical eng.

Publications

Conferences

Presentations

  • March 2012: Ethercat in research at Hightech Mechatronics
  • 28 May 2010: Willow Garage Beta Program: Explaining our proposal PDF_PRESENTATION, YOUTUBE_MOVIE
  • 20 July 2010: RoboEarth Workshop: Explaining ROS architecture


Projects

Software-Hardware projects: Guided Masterthesis:
  • Rida Burms (11-12) - Embedded Ethercat on FPGA
  • Martijn Van Loocke (11-12) - Human motion capturing: Skeletonisation
  • Inge Fameay (11-12) - Human motion capturing: Hand gesture estimation
  • Jorn Wijckmans (11-12) - Human motion capturing: Avatar customisation
  • Thijs Parmentier (10-11) - Human motion capturing: Multi-level visual features
  • Frederik Debrouwere (10-11) - Human motion capturing: Sensor fusion
  • Tedla Weldie (10-11) - Ethercat GigE camera syncronisation
  • Karel Gallee (10-11) - Active camera system design
  • Jitse Buelens (10-11) - Active camera system design
  • Niels Van Malderen (09-10) - Human motion capturing: Visual Hull reconstruction
  • Enea Scioni (09-10)- Porting ROS to Peoplebot and Lias, embedded implementation of ROS
  • Maarten Dever (09-10) - Embedded Showsystem Interface
Guided Internships:
  • Blender for Robotics 2010: Blender Python Blog: Izaak Van Crombrugge and Peter Roelants
  • Ethercat for mobile platforms 2010: Pierre Andre and Sebastien Ferris
  • Active camera system design 2010: Jeremy Mech
  • Biomechanical model in Blender 2010: Jeroen Lecoutere
  • PR2 Demonstrator 2010: Thijs Parmentier

Conferences

Webpages specifically for conference contributions:

Links

Group: People (from our research group): Interesting Projects: