Recognition of request through hand gesture for mobile care robots

We are developing a service robot that provides assisted-care, such as serving tea to the elderly in care facilities. From the sociological analysis of human-human interaction in care facilities, we have found that people often use nonverbal behaviors such as raising their hand to make a request to caregivers. In this paper, we propose a request gesture recognition method for our service robot. In day care facilities, many people are moving around. Hence it is a difficult problem to correctly recognize request gestures among various movements. We have solved this problem by exploiting the sociological interaction analysis result. We have found that a person who would like to make a request to a caregiver waits for the moment when the caregiver looks in the direction towards the person, and then shows a request signal such as raising his/her hand. This means that the robot needs to analyze human motions only when it finds a frontal face in the direction of its face. We have developed a robot system to perform such request recognition and confirmed its effectiveness through experiments.