A Novel Gesture Control Scheme of Mobile Robots Based on ROS

Abstract

Gesture control is one form of human-computer interaction, which captures the gesture image through the camera and parses it into corresponding instructions to control the movement of mobile robots. As an intuitive, convenient and flexible interaction method, gesture control can be used as an assisted control way of warehousing and logistics robots, intelligent wheelchairs and so on. In this paper, a mobile robot gesture-controlling scheme was designed and implemented using MATLAB and Robot Operating System (ROS). Firstly, a hand gesture image was captured using a RGBD camera and then was preprocessed using MATLAB. Then, the gesture contour was extracted through morphological processing and the gesture was recognized based on pixels’ changing. Finally, a MATLAB-ROS interface was developed to convert the recognized gestures into corresponding commands to control the basic movements(forward, backward, turn left, turn right and stop, etc.) of a mobile robot. A TurtleBot2-a mobile robot using ROS was used to test this scheme. The results show that the scheme this paper put forwarded can recognize five commonly used static gestures and can control five basic movements of TurtleBot2 successfully and the recognition and controlling accuracy can attain over 90%.