Towards Complex Human Robot Cooperation Based on Gesture-Controlled Autonomous Navigation

This paper presents a new approach for human robot co- operation, where a mobile ground robot is provided with the ability of following a person that has been detected with a Kinect sensor. It can plan a trajectory to follow the person and avoid obstacles that appear in the environment in an autonomous way. It has been developed to work in coordinated tasks where the person needs to exchange data and ta ke advantage of the sensors, communications and other capabilities of the robot, in order to accomplish a collaborative labor with a situation of proximate interaction. The UGV is controlled by reading some pre defined gestures of the person, and the autonomous navigation is based on a well established navigation scheme. A set of initial experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the system