Gesture based Human Multi-Robot Interaction

The emergence of robot applications for nontechnical users implies designing new ways of interaction between robotic platforms and users. The main goal of this work is the development of a gestural interface to interact with robots in a similar way as humans do, allowing the user to provide information of the task with non-verbal communication. The gesture recognition application has been implemented using the Microsoft's Kinect (TM) v2 sensor. Hence, a real-time algorithm based on skeletal features is described to deal with both, static gestures and dynamic ones, being the latter recognized using a weighted Dynamic Time Warping method. The gesture recognition application has been implemented in a multi-robot case. A NAO humanoid robot is in charge of interacting with the users and respond to the visual signals they produce. Moreover, a wheeled Wifibot robot carries both the sensor and the NAO robot, easing navigation when necessary. A broad set of user tests have been carried out demonstrating that the system is, indeed, a natural approach to human robot interaction, with a fast response and easy to use, showing high gesture recognition rates.