A Visual Language for Robot Control and Programming: A Human-Interface Study

Gregory Dudek, Junaed Sattar, Anqi Xu

Abstract: We describe an interaction paradigm for controlling a robot using hand gestures. In particular, we are interested in the control of an underwater robot by an on-site human operator. Under this context, vision-based control is very attractive, and we propose a robot control and programming mechanism based on visual symbols. A human operator presents engineered visual targets to the robotic system, which recognizes and interprets them. This paper describes the approach and proposes a specific gesture language called "RoboChat". RoboChat allows an operator to control a robot and even express complex programming concepts, using a sequence of visually presented symbols, encoded into fiducial markers. We evaluate the efficiency and robustness of this symbolic communication scheme by comparing it to traditional gesture-based interaction involving a remote human operator