Kinect sensor implementation in FANUC robot manipulation

The paper presents a control system of the FANUC S-420F, a six-axis robot. Its control system is based on gesture monitoring and recognition using the Microsoft Kinect Motion Controller. The motion of the operator’s/controller’s hand can naturally and intuitively control the robot that performs day-to-day pick-and-place operations. The system was implemented in the Matlab/Simulink environment with Kinect for Windows Runtime and Kinect SDK & Developer Toolkit library. To investigate the system, a set of gestures used to control the robot was developed. The influence of light, distance from the robot, the speed of gestures performed by the operator on the system was tested. The paper presents test results and elaborates on the advantages and potential problems of the proposed control system.