Gesture Based Wireless Single-Armed Robot in Cartesian 3D Space Using Kinect

Human Machine Interaction (HMI) has always played an important role in everybody´s life motivating research in the area of intelligent service robots. Conventional methods such as remote controllers or wearables cannot cater the high demands in some scenarios. To overcome this situation, the challenge is to develop vision-based gesture recognition techniques. This paper describes our work of controlling an Arduino based wheeled, one armed robot, used as a prototype, controlled through various gestures of the arms and legs. For gesture recognition, we make use of skeletal tracing ability of Kinect -- a product of Microsoft. Bluetooth is used to make the controls wireless. Since it is not line of sight operation, the robot also captures the environment video and transmits it over radio frequency in real-time and displayed on the screen. On the user end, according to the received video, the operator guides the robot and uses the arm to pick and place objects with the help of predetermined gestures.