Hand movement detection using monocular camera for robot cooperation

This paper describes a visual function for a robot who engages an assemble task with partner robots cooperatively. In this study, we suppose a typical case in a cooperative work: one robot observes the hand movement of another robot who is going to manipulate an object, in order to recognize how he will grasp the target object. We present a basic method by which the observing robot can detect feature points on the hand of the manipulating robot from image sequences taken by a camera, calculate 3-D position of the hand from those feature points based on stereo vision principle, then detect movement of the hand. Harris operator was used for detecting feature points of the hand. Corresponding points are determined considering disparity smoothness constraint.