Novel application of ultrasonic sensors and Kinect sensors to identify people and measure their location — Realization of "Human SUGOROKU", A large scale board game in which people play as pieces

The authors are developing a novel learning support system "Human SUGOROKU" by integration of ultrasonic sensors and Kinect sensors. The system is a relocatable large scale digital board game that human-players as its piece move on squares. To realize the system, we measure players locations and gestures identifying players, by integrating output information from both sensors. This paper explains overview of the system and proposes a method to reduce installation time. That length of installation time is one of the most serious problems when we relocate the system. Most part of the time is spent to unify sensors' coordinate systems. Usually, as each sensor has own coordinate system, we can't use sensors' output directly without unifying their coordinate systems. In order to unify sensors' coordinate systems, we need accurate positioning of the sensors, but accurate positioning manually is difficult and takes much time. The proposed method is a positioning-free convenient unifying method for different kinds of multiple sensors by using dedicated instrument. We conduct an experiment to evaluate the proposed method, and confirm that the method can reduce installation time for the system.