Human-robot interface using uncalibrated stereo vision

This paper presents a human-robot interface system that enables a user to move a robot by moving his hand. The system adopts uncalibrated stereo vision based on the affine invariants from multiple views. The system can interpret hand gestures both in the user-centered frame and in the world-fixed frame. Suppose the user wants to indicate the direction of a mobile robot motion by the direction of his hand. If he moves his hand forward, the robot moves straight ahead regardless of his body position, that is, regardless of the hand direction in the world by the former interpretation. By the latter interpretation, however, the robot turns towards the direction indicated by the hand. The former is useful when we operate a teleoperation robot while watching the images sent from the robot. Operation experiments show the usefulness of the system.