Human pointing as a robot directive

People are accustomed to directing other people´s attention using pointing gestures. People enact and interpret pointing commands often and effortlessly. If robots understand human intentions (e.g. as encoded in pointing-gestures), they can reach higher levels of engagement with people. This paper explores methods that robots can use to allow people to direct them to move to a specific location, using an inexpensive Kinect sensor. The joint positions of the pointing human´s right arm and hand in 3D-space are extracted and used by the robot to identify the direction of user´s pointing gesture. We evaluated the proposed approach on a PR2 robot whose task was to move to a location that a human pointed to on the ground. This method enables the robot to follow human pointing gestures on the fly and in real-time. It will be deployed on a PR2 in the wild in a new building environment where the robot will be expected to interact with people and interpret their human pointing behaviors.