Robot responds to body language
From: NASA Tech Brief Insider - 03/25/2009

A Brown University-led robotics team has demonstrated how a robot can follow
nonverbal commands from a person in various environments, all without
adjusting for lighting. Using a video, Brown graduate students used various
hand-arm signals to instruct the robot, including 'follow', 'wait', and 'door
breach'. They commanded the robot to move through an open doorway, stop, turn
around, and then cross the threshold again to return where it had started. 

The Brown team started with a PackBot, a mechanized platform developed by
iRobot that has been used widely by the US military for bomb disposal. The
researchers outfitted their robot with a commercial depth-imaging camera.
They also geared the robot with a laptop equipped with programs that enabled
the machine to recognize, decipher, and respond to human gestures. 

The researchers made two key advances with their robot. The first involved
what scientists call visual recognition. They created a computer program,
whereby the robot recognized a human by extracting a silhouette, as if a
person were a virtual cutout. They also used a depth imaging camera that uses
infrared light to detect objects and to establish distances between the
camera and both the target object and any other objects in the area. 

Read the entire article at:
http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2009/03/robotics

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf-i44hoVMQ

Mobile Human-Robot Teaming Enabled by Depth-Imaging
http://robotics.cs.brown.edu/projects/hr_teams/