Hand and Arm Gesture-based Human-Robot Interaction: A Review

They support human users in various areas, such as industry [26, 13, 14], retail [9, 59], home service [10, 19], entertainment [39], and caretaker [4, 52, 22, 15]. The importance of constructing a natural and intuitive 1 interaction between humans and robots is self-evident. Inspired by the human-human interaction (HHI), the communication approach in human-robot interaction (HRI) is also through verbal and nonverbal channels [2]. Within these interaction channels, nonverbal communication is an unspoken dialogue that creates shared meaning in social interactions [3]. As one important aspect of the HRI, nonverbal interaction can help the robot provide communicative functionality that is natural and intuitive to their human interaction partners [44]. Gesture, as a popular nonverbal HRI, includes hand and arm movement, body behavior, facial emotional expression, and gaze shifts [37]. Hand and arm gestures are generally defined as the upper body limb's significant movement and produce an expression of feeling or rhetoric [46]. Among the HRI approaches, hand and arm gesture-based interaction is one of the most important nonverbal interaction methods. It is due to the irreplaceable advantages brought by gesture-based in HRI for several reasons: (i) Gesture-based interaction is one of the critical elements of human communication, and it offers a natural and intuitive approach to HRI spontaneously [42].