Patrick Goebel of PI Robot has put together an excellent tutorial on doing 3D head tracking with ROS. In Part 1 he covers configuring TFs, setting up the URDF model and configuration of Dynamixel AX-12+ servos for controlling the pan and tilt of a Kinect.
Besides more accurate depth estimation, one benefit of using a 3D sensor to perform head tracking is that it allows for the rejection of false positives by providing a means for the robot to distinguish between a person's head and a picture of a person's head.
You may also be interested in his previous tutorial on OpenCV Head Tracking.
Announcement from Patrick Goebel of Pi Robot to ros-users
Hello ROS users,
I have put together a little tutorial on using tf to point your robot's
head toward different locations relative to different frames of
reference. Eventually I'll get the tutorial onto the ROS wiki, but for
now it lives at:
http://www.pirobot.org/blog/0018/
The tutorial uses the ax12_controller_core package from the ua-ros-pkg
repository. Many thanks to Anton Rebguns for patiently helping me get
the launch files set up.
Please post any questions or bug reports to http://answers.ros.org or
email me directly.
Patrick Goebel
The Pi Robot Project
http://www.pirobot.org
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