Towards an immersive and natural gesture controlled interface for intervention underwater robots

During underwater intervention missions, one of the critical issues, from the human-machine interaction perspective, concerns the operator´s stress, which should be able to control the intervention system, mainly due to the high complexity of information displayed through specifically designed Graphical User Interface, and the usually available master-slave control architecture. So, this paper introduces a new approach with the aim to minimize the aforementioned drawbacks and, in the meantime, increasing the user´s immersive feeling. Preliminary results are discussed highlighting the pros and cons of this novel procedure.