Impacts of teaching towards training gesture recognizers for human-robot interaction

The use of hand-based gestures has been proposed as an intuitive way for people to communicate with robots. Typically the set of gestures is defined by the experimenter. However, existing works do not necessarily focus on gestures that are communicative, and it is unclear whether the selected gesture are actually intuitive to users. This paper investigates whether different people inherently use similar gestures to convey the same commands to robots, and how teaching of gestures when collecting demonstrations for training recognizers can improve resulting accuracy. We conducted this work in two stages. In Stage 1, we conducted an online user study (n=190) to investigate if people use similar gestures to communicate the same set of given commands to a robot when no guidance or training was given. Results revealed large variations in the gestures used among individuals With the absences of training. Training a gesture recognizer using this dataset resulted in an accuracy of around 20%. In response to this, Stage 2 involved proposing a common set of gestures for the commands. We taught these gestures through demonstrations and collected ~ 7500 videos of gestures from study participants to train another gesture recognition model. Initial results showed improved accuracy but a number of gestures had high confusion rates. Refining our gesture set and recognition model by removing those gestures, We achieved an final accuracy of 84.1 ± 2.4%. We integrated the gesture recognition model into the ROS framework and demonstrated a use case, where a person commands a robot to perform a pick and place task using the gesture set.