MEGURU: a gesture-based robot program builder for Meta-Collaborative workstations

This paper presents the Meta-Collaborative Workstation concept and a gesture-based robot program builder software named MEGURU. The software is ROS-based, and it is publicly available on GitHub. A hand-gestures language has been developed to create a fast and easy to use communication method, where single-hand gestures are combined to create composed Commands, allowing the user to create a customized, powerful, and flexible Gestures Dictionary. Gestures are recognized using an R-FCN Object Detector model fine-tuned on a custom dataset developed for this work. The system has been tested in two experiments. The first one was aimed at evaluating the user experience of people of different age, sex, and professional background concerning the proposed communication method. The second one was aimed at comparing the traditional teach pendant programming method and MEGURU in the task of assembling a small Moka coffee maker. The results of both experiments highlight that MEGURU is a promising robot programming method, especially for non-expert users.