An AI Taekwondo Trainer
Part 2 — The Walk Through
Welcome to article number 2 about my journey of creating an AI powered taekwondo trainer! If you haven’t already, I would highly suggest you read part one before moving onto part two to better understand the technology behind this project. So in this article, we’re getting right to the point. No fluff.
What Can it Do?
The trainer is primarily designed to improve your sidekicks. The AI taekwondo trainer will count the number of sidekicks you do, while also making sure you do them right.
Let me walk you through it. When you do a sidekick it’s really important that you point your toes down and your heel up. In other words, your heel needs to be higher than your toes. And it’s also super important to bring your knee in before you kick and right after to make sure no one grabs you by the foot (because that would be pretty terrible).
These are tiny details that are easy to forget when you’re practicing your kicks (take it from me). So, to help that, this trainer will keep track of all that stuff.
How Does it Work?
Angles, angles, angles. I’m talking about the angles at which your legs and feet are at when you’re kicking. First, we must find your maximum and minimum angle. The maximum angle is the highest your kick can go and the minimum is just the angle at which your legs are while resting (this is to ensure you finish the sidekick completely).
Since this trainer is personalized, this process is very important. Everyone will have different angles based on their abilities. This also means everyone will have different maximum and minimum values. Once those angles are imputed, you’re good to go!
Landmarks:
This model is using number 23, 24, 28 to find the angles.
The bar on the right tells you how close you are to reaching your maximum angle.
The counter on the left side counts the number of sidekicks you have done. Keep in mind, the counter will only count the sidekicks that have reached both the highest and lowest angles. So, in essence, no half-kicks will be counted.
You know what…instead of telling you, I’ll just show you!
Vision for the Future
While the trainer only focuses on sidekicks right now, there is so much we can do with this technology to advance it further.
Here are a few things I’m doing to make this trainer better:
- Get the model to learn for itself and automatically input the maximum/minimum angles after you kick a few times.
- Continue to adjust the maximum angle based on your improvement.
This trainer was so much fun to build and I’m so glad to share it with you. Throughout the way, there were many problems I encountered, but thanks to some amazing mentors those problems were soon fixed.
And thanks to you too! Thanks for reading!
