Operating a Mobile Robot by Gesture Recognition

Abstract

A human friendly man-machine interface is important to realize mobile robots which have a close relation with people. This paper proposes a method to operate a mobile robot by gesture recognition. Hand gestures are utilized as natural operations for a person. A hand's region is extracted from a sequence of images using color information, and gesture recognition is realized by DP matching for a sequence of features of hand's regions. So as to realize robustness, a face's area is utilized to estimate the distance between a person and the camera, and several features of hand's regions are utilized which are free of the position of a hand in an image. Experiments show that the proposed methods are effective, and the methods can operate a mobile robot.