A General Approach to Natural Human-Robot Interaction

This paper proposes a scheme for letting a human interact with a generic robot in a natural manner. Based on the concept of natural user interfaces, the proposed methods exploit recognition of the users’ forearm motion to produce commands for the robotic system. High-level commands are provided based on gesture recognition, and velocity commands are computed for the robot by mapping, in a natural manner, the motion of the user’s forearm. The method is proposed in a general manner, and is then instantiated considering two different robotic systems, namely a quadrotor and a wheeled mobile robot. Usability of the system is evaluated with experiments involving users.