A hand gesture based virtual interface for wheelchair control

A reliable system that uses hand gestures to control a wheelchair is presented. The control actions are generated by gestures of a bare or gloved hand. The gestures are recognized and identified in a scale, position, orientation and skin color independent manner. Yet the position and orientation of the hand gesture for motion control are used for speed and steering angle control. The interface works equally well with either of the hands and can be interchanged anytime without any changes to the system. The hand gestures are organized in a hierarchy taking into account the ergonomics, reliability of identification and the mode of operation. The modes of operation are; the manual mode and the map mode. The results presented show the behavior of the wheelchair in response to manual and map mode hand gesture commands. The system has been put to test by persons of different hand shapes and proved to be extremely reliable.