The aim of this paper is to present a novel architecture for hand gesture-based control of mobile robots. The research activity was mainly focused on the design of a new method for hand gestures recognition under unconstrained scenes. Our method comes to solve some of the most important problems that current HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) systems fight with: changes of lighting, long distances, speed. Like any other HRI specific method, the one that we developed is working in real time/environment. It is a robust and adaptive method, being able to deal with changes of lighting. It is also capable of recognizing hand gestures from long distances. Another important issue we have focused upon was the integration of our method into a more complex HRI system, in which a human operator can drive a mobile robot only through hand gestures. In systems like these, the communication between human operators and robotic systems should be done in the most natural way. Typically, communication is done through voice and hands/head postures and gestures. Our method was designed in such a manner that will be able to recognize the hand gestures even if there are certain deviations from the ideal cases.

In this paper, we describe a proposed Automatic Speech Recognition system that can be used to give vocal commands to a robotic system. The system was specially created to use Romanian as the main language with respect to its particularities: specific phonetic rules and large variety of accents. The main purpose of the system is to act as a touch-less interface for a demonstrative robotic system. This interface was designed to allow a remote human user to give simple commands to the robotic system without any physical contact with the robot. There are more ways to create an Automatic Speech Recognition System but, given the complexity of the task, the methods that were used had to be reliable and this is the reason while the Hidden Markov Models approach was chosen. The current status of the project allows a remote user to give simple commands to the experimental robot using a microphone, a laptop or a PDA and wireless connection.

We discuss in this paper several implementations of computer vision applications that were developed in the last two years in our laboratory and for which gesture-based interactions were introduced. The aim is to provide enhanced human-computer interfaces for several commonly encountered application scenarios: manipulating virtual objects and working inside virtual environments, playing computer games and interacting with robotic systems. We particularly focused on table-based systems which allow natural and intuitive interactions as they transform into comfortable and familiar interfaces.

The aim of this paper is to present the results obtained during the project 131-CEEX/2006, INTEROB: Interacting by Gestures with Information and Robotics Systems for the time frame 2006 - 2008. The project focused on natural interaction using gesture recognition technology applied in various applications such as: virtual environments, augmented reality, collaborative working and interaction with robotics systems.