Hands-On Robotics: Enabling Communication Through Direct Gesture Control.

Effective Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is fundamental to seamlesslyintegrating robotic systems into our daily lives. However, currentcommunication modes require additional technological interfaces, which can becumbersome and indirect. This paper presents a novel approach, using directmotion-based communication by moving a robot's end effector. Our strategyenables users to communicate with a robot by using four distinct gestures –two handshakes ('formal' and 'informal') and two letters ('W' and 'S'). As aproof-of-concept, we conducted a user study with 16 participants, capturingsubjective experience ratings and objective data for training machine learningclassifiers. Our findings show that the four different gestures performed bymoving the robot's end effector can be distinguished with close to 100accuracy. Our research offers implications for the design of future HRIinterfaces, suggesting that motion-based interaction can empower humanoperators to communicate directly with robots, removing the necessity foradditional hardware.