An interactive gesture control system for collaborative manipulator based on Leap Motion Controller

Gesture control is often used for the control of robotic manipulators. However conventional methods always focus on position control of robotic manipulators and use a fixed position to place gesture detection devices, which limits the flexibility to control and interact. This paper presents an interactive gesture control system based on Leap Motion Controller that can overcome these shortcomings. A coordinate transformation is performed between the position of the left palm detected by Leap Motion Controller and the tool center point (TCP) of the collaborative manipulator to obtain gesture data first. This gesture data is used to control the posture of a six-joint collaborative manipulator-Lite6. The position of gripper is controlled by grip level of the right palm. A controller is designed to manipulate a lift table on which Leap Motion Controller is placed to achieve adaptive ascending and descending movements to meet the needs of operators of different heights and arm spans. A modified Kalman filter is used to filter noise and smooth the signal captured by Leap Motion Controller. The experiments demonstrate that the system can operate stably and accurately control the position, posture, and gripper position of a collaborative manipulator in real time using human palms’ gestures.