Robot-Supported Pointing Interaction for Intelligent Environments

A natural interaction with appliances in smart environment is a highly desired form of controlling the surroundings using intuitively learned interpersonal means of communication. Hand and arm gestures, recognized by depth cameras, are a popular representative of this interaction paradigm. However they usually require stationary units that limit applicability in larger environments. To overcome this problem we are introducing a self-localizing mobile robot system that autonomously follows the user in the environment, in order to recognize performed gestures independent from the current user position. We have realized a prototypical implementation using a custom robot platform and evaluated the system with various users.