Control of Robot Directions Based on Online Hand Gestures

Abstract

The evolution of wireless communication technology increases human machine interaction capabilities especially in controlling robotic systems. This paper introduces an effective wireless system in controlling the directions of a wheeled robot based on online hand gestures. The hand gesture images are captured and processed to be recognized and classified using neural network (NN). The NN is trained using extracted features to distinguish five different gestures; accordingly it produces five different signals. These signals are transmitted to control the directions of the cited robot. The main contribution of this paper is, the technique used to recognize hand gestures is required only two features, these features can be extracted in very short time using quite easy methodology, and this makes the proposed technique so suitable for online interaction. In this methodology, the preprocessed image is partitioned column-wise into two half segments; from each half one feature is extracted. This feature represents the ratio of white to black pixels of the segment histogram. The NN showed very high accuracy in recognizing all of the proposed gesture classes. The NN output signals are transmitted to the robot microcontroller wirelessly using Bluetooth. Accordingly the microcontroller guides the robot to the desired direction. The overall system showed high performance in controlling the robot movement directions.