Controlling a group of robots to perform a common task by gestures only

Abstract

This paper presents a novel human-robot interaction method for controlling a group of robots by one human operator. We developed a gesture system where one hand is used to select a particular robot from the group and the other to issue motion commands. One robot is controlled at a time but switching to another is only a question of raising different number of fingers on hand. Input for our algorithm is a single raw depth stream. We verified our design in laboratory environment. Three robots were controlled by gestures and accomplished a common task.