Human-Robot Interaction with Depth-Based Gesture Recognition

Human robot interaction is a very heterogeneous research field and it is attracting a growing interest. A key building block for a proper interaction between humans and robots is the automatic recognition and interpretation of gestures performed by the user. Consumer depth cameras (like MS Kinect) have made possible an accurate and reliable interpretation of human gestures. In this paper a novel framework for gesture- based human-robot interaction is proposed. Both hand gestures and full-body gestures are recognized through the use of depth information, and a human-robot interaction scheme based on these gestures is proposed. In order to assess the feasibility of the proposed scheme, the paper presents a simple application based on the well-known rock-scissors-paper game.