Gesture-controlled Robot Arm

Gesture-driven robots aren’t something new, but the folks over at Japan’s Tsukuba University have come up with a robot arm that is rather impressive. This robot arm allows humans to control it by analyzing the movements of their hands and arms based on a video stream, after which the robot will mimic the movements in almost real-time. This setup is unique as the two cameras that it uses are capable of measuring movements, orientation and the position of a human’s hand and its shape over 100 times a second. The robot is capable of doing some simple-yet impressive things such as detecting a human clenching his fist or grabbing an object. Sounds like an easy way to teach robots to perform new feats.