An Underwater Human–Robot Interaction Using Hand Gestures for Fuzzy Control

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) plays an important role in ocean research and exploration. The underwater environment has a great influence on AUV control and human–robot interaction, since underwater environment is highly dynamic with unpredictable fluctuation of water flow, high pressure and light attenuation. The traditional control model contains a large number of parameters, which is not effective and produces errors frequently. The proposal of fuzzy control addressed this issue to a certain extent. It applies fuzzy variables to the controller, which replace the values in an interval. In addition to the controller, underwater human–robot interaction is also difficult. Divers cannot speak or show any facial expressions underwater. The buttons on the AUV also need to overcome the huge water pressure. In this paper, we proposed a method to recognize the gesture instructions and apply it to the fuzzy control of AUV. Our contribution is the gesture recognition framework for the human–robot interaction, including the gesture detection network and the algorithm for the control of AUV. The experiment result shows the efficiency of the proposed method.