Real-time hand tracking with a color glove for the actuation of anthropomorphic robot hands

We extend a recent low cost real-time method of hand tracking and pose estimation in order to control an anthropomorphic robot hand. The approach is data-driven and based on matching the current image of a color-gloved hand with the best fitting image in a database to retrieve the posture. Then, using depth information from a Kinect camera and a color-sensitive iterative closest point-to-triangle algorithm we can very accurately estimate the absolute position and orientation of the hand. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated in an application in which we actively control a 20 DOF anthropomorphic robot hand in a manual interaction grasping task.