A Human Robot Interaction-based approach to automation in industrial manufacturing

The aim of this paper is to present an innovative Human Robot Interaction-based system which allows a human operator to interact with an industrial robot in a natural way, through hand gestures, for the purpose of creating prototype products, consisting of one or two small integrated circuit boards on which different integrated circuits can be placed in a custom configuration. The interaction between the human operator and the industrial robot is achieved through a 3D virtual environment which was designed in such a manner so that it closely resembles with the working area of the industrial robot. The 3D virtual environment allows a human operator to easily build a prototype product by using hand gestures and a 3D virtual mouse which is also controlled through hands. The 3D hand gesture recognition module consists of a Dynamic Time Warping algorithm which computes the hands trajectories´ similarity and a k-nearest neighbor algorithm for classification.