Vision-Based Hand Gesture Recognition for Human-Robot Collaboration: A Survey

Recently, human-robot collaboration has attracted many research interests. Unlike traditional industrial robots, human-robot collaboration combines the advantages of robots with the flexibility and cognitive skills of human worker to work together in a shared manufacturing environment. However, to achieve an efficient human-robot collaboration, the communication channels between human workers and robots needs to be tackled. Vision-based hand gesture recognition has been effectively applied as the interface between humans and computer for long time. So, this paper presents a survey of the vision-based hand gesture recognition research in human-robot collaborative manufacturing. We first propose an overall model of vision-based hand gesture recognition for human-robot collaboration. Then, we review three essential technical components of this model: sensor technologies, hand gesture detection and segmentation and hand gesture classification. In addition, the relevant techniques for vision-based hand gesture recognition are compared. Towards the end of this paper, future research trends are discussed.