One of the capabilities of most service and social robots is face detection and tracking. These robots can identify faces and can move their heads according to the human face that moves around it. There are numerous implementations of face detection and tracking systems on the Web. Most trackers have a pan-and-tilt mechanism, and a camera is mounted on the top of the servos. In this chapter, we will see a simple tracker that only has a pan mechanism. We are going to use a USB webcam mounted on an AX-12 Dynamixel servo. The controlling of Dynamixel servo and image processing are done in ROS.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• An overview of the project
• Hardware and software prerequisites
• Configuring Dynamixel AX-12 servos
• The connection diagram of the project
• Interfacing Dynamixel with ROS
• Creating ROS packages for a face tracker and controller
• The ROS-OpenCV interface
• Implementing a face tracker and face tracker controller
• The final run