Week 4 Post 3

 As I am progressing on my work with hand gesture recognition, I now have my own dataset. My next step is to extract the x and y coordinates from the frames in the video of my hand going up, down, left, and right. How I understand this assignment is from the perspective of a bounding box that captures the hand palm in each frame, recognizing it, and then finding the center in that bounding box, which has x and y coordinates. It is also possible to find the height and width of the captured object, but as of now, I don't need it for my project. By extracting the x and y coordinates, I will be able to teach a robot to recognize my palm using the YOLO algorithm and move the robot's hands similarly to my hand movements. This task reminds me of teaching a child how to use their hands to hold a spoon, for example. Growing up with my niece, I was the one who would always take responsibility for teaching my niece various movements because it was exciting to me to be able to be in the role of a teacher. I used my hand to show her how to place a spoon in her hand and how to move it closer to the object, which was a cup or a plate, and how to scoop something from the object and move it in the direction of the mouth. And I would repeat that process many times because repetition was helping her learn faster and more efficiently. That is a very similar process to what I am doing now in the Robotics Lab, trying to display all the necessary information from the videos of hand movements so that the robot could learn it and repeat the same thing. I recorded twenty videos for each hand gesture (up, down, left, right) just so that the dataset is big enough to let the robot learn. Having twenty videos for each of the movements is still considered a small dataset, but it is just the beginning to get to know the process of interaction between a human and a robot. This task is beneficial for the robot and for me so that I could get more comfortable using reinforcement learning, and the robot could learn something new in the future. I am very proud of myself for not giving up on this project and keeping going even though it sometimes gets complicated. I use the tools that I have never used before, and I work more with engineering than ever before, and I can already see my progress in that project. My excitement gets only bigger, so I look forward to continuing this journey for six more weeks.

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