Controlling Robots using a Wiimote and Gesture Recognition

[Dan Richardson]

Some guys in the lab I work at have been using Wiimotes for some of the research they've been doing in using gestures to control teleoperated/semi autonomous vehicles. This is a video thats shows some of their work. I thought it was pretty neat and deffinately very relavent to the FIRST community.

One of the neatest things that this technology features is the implementation of JAUS, which is the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems. These wiimotes can actually be implemented and used in any system that utilisizes JAUS, which the Armed Forces are pushing for.

Why does this peak my interest other than being really really cool? This article discusses how Virginia Tech and Torc Technologies developed a set of LabVIEW tools that apparently can work with the CompactRio. I'd love to see implemenation of this technology on a robot next year, not sure what the rules will be on whether or not you could use Wiimotes, but at the very least implementing Jaus is a possibility, which would be a pretty cool feat.