Robot Identification and Localization with Pointing Gestures

We propose a novel approach to establish the relative pose of a mobile robot with respect to an operator that wants to interact with it; we focus on scenarios in which the robot is in the same environment as the operator, and is visible to them. The approach is based on comparing the trajectory of the robot, which is known in the robot’s odometry frame, to the motion of the arm of the operator, who, for a short time, keeps pointing at the robot they want to interact with. In multi-robot scenarios, the same approach can be used to simultaneously identify which robot the operator wants to interact with. The main advantage over alternatives is that our system only relies on the robot’s odometry, on a wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU), and, crucially, on the operator’s own perception. We experimentally show the feasibility of our approach using real-world robots.