Gesture recognition for human-friendly interface in designer-consumer cooperate design system

A future system for flexible manufacturing must be a sensor-complex for multi-modality with high intelligence, since such a system should work with a human who has a variety of expression methods and acceptance channels. The paper describes three topics from our researches on gesture and haptic interfaces which can be introduced for a human-friendly interface in a designer-consumer cooperative production system. The first one is a gesture information acquisition method using an image processing technique. The second one is another gesture recognition system by employing accelerometers to measure the forces applied to the body. A haptic-communication device is introduced as the third topic of the paper. It is able not only to detect grasping force and the device orientation, but also to display the tactile sensation using the vibration motors to realize human-machine and human-human haptic communications.