Robotic Gesture Recognition

Abstract

. Robots of the future should communicate with humans in a natural way. We are especially interested in vision-based gesture interfaces. In the context of robotics several constraints exist, which make the task of gesture recognition particularly challenging. We discuss these constraints and report on progress being made in our lab in the development of techniques for building robust gesture interfaces which can handle these constraints. In an example application, the techniques are shown to be easily combined to build a gesture interface for a real robot grasping objects on a table in front of it. 1 Introduction Robots of the future must interact with humans in a natural way if they are to become part of our everyday lives. They must understand spoken and gestural commands and also articulate themselves by these means. We are especially interested in vision-based gesture recognition for robots operating in real world environments. This poses a number of constraints to human robot int...