International Journal For Technological Research In Engineering Volume 1, Issue 8, April-2014 ISSN (Online): 2347 - 4718 REAL - TIME ROBOT CAR CONTROL USING HAND SIGN RECOGNITION Ankit Multanmal Oswal 1 , Gagan Shivarama Shetty 2 , Mridul Anil Hiwarkar 3 Sanjeev Kumar Malik 4 , Mrs. Hemangi Shinde 5 1,2,3,4 Students, 5 Assistance Professor, Department of Electronics and Telecommunication, AISSMS’s Institute of Information Technology Pune, India. Abstract: This paper presents a novel algorithm to recognize a set of static hand gestures for the Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) and controlling a robotic car wirelessly after successful recognition using X-Bee module. Through this method, the user can control or navigate the robot by using gestures of his/her palm. The command signals are generated from these gestures using image processing. These signals are then passed to the robot to navigate it in the specified directions. In short we have implemented a system through which the user can give commands to a wireless robot using gestures. The application for gesture recognition has been created on MATLAB environment with operating system as windows 7. The system has been tested and verified under both incandescent and fluorescent lighting conditions. The experimental results are very encouraging as the system produces real-time responses and highly accurate recognition towards various gestures. Index Terms: Hand Gesture Recognition, Human Robot Interaction, Image Processing, MATLAB, Robot Control, Webcam, Wireless, X-Bee. I. INTRODUCTION Recently, the demand for the indoor robots has increased tremendously. Therefore, increased opportunities for many people to operate the robots have emerged. However, for many people, it is often difficult to operate a robot using the conventional methods like remote control ([15], [16], and [17]). The variety of physical shapes and functional commands that each remote control features also raises numerous problems: the difficulties in locating the required remote control, the confusion with the button layout, the replacement issue and so on. A simple definition of the term gesture is suggestive movement of bodily parts such as fingers, arms etc, which convey some information ([2], [8], [17]). Waving the hand is a gesture that suggests “good bye”. Even though gestures can originate from any bodily movement, generally it originates from movement of face or hand. Gesture is one of the most natural and expressive ways of communications between human and computer in a real system ([3], [10], [13], and [17]). We naturally use various gestures to express our own intentions in everyday life. Hand gesture is one of the important methods of non-verbal communication for human beings. Hand gesture has been one of the most common and natural communication media among human being. Hand gesture recognition research has gained a lot of attention because of its applications for intera- ctive human-machine interface and virtual environments ([3], [10], and [19]). So, we propose a robot operation system using the hand gesture recognition. Based on one unified set of hand gestures, this system interprets the user hand gestures into pre-defined commands to control the robotic car wirelessly using X-Bee module. Unlike the conventional method for hand gesture recognition which makes use of markers, special gloves or any other devices, this method does not require any additional devices and makes the user comfortable as in the glove-based system user needs to wear burdensome accessories, which are generally connected to computer ([4],[7],[14],[18]). This barehanded proposed technique uses only 2D video input. Our hand gesture recognition system was carried out on a 2.33 GHz Intel (R) Core TM 2Duo CPU 2 GB RAM on Windows 7 platform using MATLAB R2010a. II. PROPOSED WORK The robot control system includes four parts as shown in Figure 1: A webcam connected with the laptop computer. A gesture recognition system running on a laptop computer. A robotic car and the robot controller. A pair of wireless communication modules connected with the gesture recognition system and the robot controller respectively. The webcam is used to obtain the image data of the human palm and fingers. The image or video acquired as input may be noisy or may reduce the performance by recognizing surrounding as hand region. The acquired data is subjected to enhancement and processed further to make it fit for approximation with the gestures (data) stored in the database. Then the data are processed to recognize the gesture. Each gesture is corresponding to a different robot control comma- Fig. 1 Proposed System Framework www.ijtre.com Copyright 2013.All rights reserved. 635