volaly

Volaly (pronounced ['volali]) is a technology for pointing-based human-robot interaction developed by the IDSIA's Robotics Group.

The repository is a ROS-meta package that defines dependencies of the project.

Dependencies

• volaly_bags A simple helper ROS package for recording and storing experimental data in one place.
• volaly_kinematics Human pointing models and virtual workspace shapes for 3D control.
• volaly_localization Pointing-based localization from motion.
• volaly_msgs Common messages used by other Volaly ROS packages.
• volaly_robots An interface package for various robots used in experiments.
• volaly_supervisor A set of finite state machines (FSMs) that drive interaction in experiments.

Note that the methods implemented in volaly_kinematics and volaly_localization are based on a patent-pending technology, and thus, you have to acquire the license from IDSIA to use it in commercial applications.

Pointing-based interaction

2D control

The following video gives an overview of pointing-based interaction and its application to flying and ground robots control. In particular, it demonstrates and briefly describes how does the pointing-based localization from motion method work (implemented in volaly_localization).

More details available at: http://people.idsia.ch/~gromov/proximity-hri-pipeline

Free 3D space

The next video demonstrates the new method that allows one to control quadrotors also in free 3D space (implemented in volaly_kinematics).

More details available at: http://people.idsia.ch/~gromov/3d-pointing

Authors

Boris Gromov, Jérôme Guzzi, and Alessandro Giusti.

Publications

• B. Gromov, J. Guzzi, L. Gambardella, and A. Giusti, “Intuitive 3D Control of a Quadrotor in User Proximity with Pointing Gestures,” in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020, to appear. Details.

  Bibtex

  @inproceedings{gromov2020intuitive,
    author = {Gromov, Boris and Guzzi, J{\'e}r{\^o}me and Gambardella, Luca and Giusti, Alessandro},
    title = {Intuitive 3D Control of a Quadrotor in User Proximity with Pointing Gestures},
    booktitle = {2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
    year = {2020},
    month = may,
    note = {to appear},
  }

• B. Gromov, G. Abbate, L. Gambardella, and A. Giusti, “Proximity Human-Robot Interaction Using Pointing Gestures and a Wrist-mounted IMU,” in 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019, pp. 8084–8091. Details.

  Bibtex

  @inproceedings{gromov2019proximity,
    author = {Gromov, Boris and Abbate, Gabriele and Gambardella, Luca and Giusti, Alessandro},
    title = {Proximity Human-Robot Interaction Using Pointing Gestures and a Wrist-mounted {IMU}},
    booktitle = {2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
    pages = {8084-8091},
    year = {2019},
    month = may,
    doi = {10.1109/ICRA.2019.8794399},
    issn = {2577-087X},
  }      

• B. Gromov, L. Gambardella, and A. Giusti, “Robot Identification and Localization with Pointing Gestures,” in 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2018, pp. 3921–3928. Details.

  Bibtex

  @inproceedings{gromov2018robot,
    author = {Gromov, Boris and Gambardella, Luca and Giusti, Alessandro},
    title = {Robot Identification and Localization with Pointing Gestures},
    booktitle = {2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
    year = {2018},
    pages = {3921-3928},
    doi = {10.1109/IROS.2018.8594174},
    issn = {2153-0866},
    month = oct,
  }

License

Most of the code is released under the BSD 3-Clause New license.

The volaly_localization and volaly_kinematics are released under BSD 3-Clause Clear license that retains the patent rights.