Mobile manipulator control through gesture recognition using IMUs and Online Lazy Neighborhood Graph search

Abstract

Gesture-based control potentially eliminates the need for wearisome physical controls and facilitates easy interaction between a human and a robot. At the same time, it is intuitive and enables a natural means of control. In this paper, we present and evaluate a framework for gesture recognition using four wearable Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to indirectly control a mobile robot. Six gestures involving different hand and arm motions are defined. A novel algorithm based on an Online Lazy Neighborhood Graph (OLNG) search is used to recognise and classify the gestures online. A software framework is developed to control a robotic platform through integrating our gesture recognition algorithm with a Robot Operating System (ROS), which is in turn used to trigger predefined robot behaviours. Experiments show that the framework is able to correctly detect and classify six different gestures in real time with average success rates of 81.61 % and 81.67 %, while keeping the false-positive rate low by designing and using only 126 training samples.