Using human gestures and generic skills to instruct a mobile robot arm in a feeder filling scenario

Mobile robots that have the ability to cooperate with humans are able to provide new possibilities to manufacturing industries. In this paper, we discuss our mobile robot arm that can a) provide assistance at different locations in a factory and b) be programmed using complex human actions such as pointing in Take this object. We discuss the use of the mobile robot for a feeding scenario where a human operator specifies the parts and the feeders through pointing gestures. The system is partially built using generic robotic skills. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate different aspects of the system.