Natural Human–Robot Interface Using Adaptive Tracking System with the Unscented Kalman Filter

Abstract

Traditional human–robot interfaces usually have limitations in accuracy and/or operational space. This article proposes a natural human–robot interface using an adaptive tracking method, which can effectively expand the operational space while ensuring high accuracy. The natural interface allows the robot to directly reproduce the user's hand movement, making the interaction more intuitive and natural. The leap motion is fixed on the Cartesian platform to capture the movement of the user's hand. Because the Cartesian platform follows the hand and keeps the hand in the center of the detection area, the measurement accuracy is improved and the measurement space can be extended. During the process of acquiring gesture data, the measurement errors were found to increase over time because of the inherent noise of the sensor. To deal with this problem, the unscented Kalman filter is applied to estimate the position of the hand. Moreover, an adaptive velocity control method is proposed to improve the operation accuracy and reduce the task execution time with the consideration of users’ habits and easiness of usage. The effectiveness of this interface is verified by a series of experiments, and the results show that the proposed interface can be used by nonprofessional users for object operation tasks and can provide users with superior interactive experiences.