Paper Abstract
"With the growing number of robots in public, gesture control will be increasingly common. However, there is no gesture set for robot control which is equally usable for blind and visually impaired (BVI) as well as sighted users. Hence, this study applies a three-staged process for the design of an accessible gesture set for human-robot interaction. In Step 1, 141 intuitive gestures for three different universal robot commands were elicited by BVI as well as sighted users. The gestures were categorized based on body parts usage and associated movements. Occurrence of gesture categories was compared between the subsamples and a preliminary gesture set was selected based on frequencies and calculated agreement indices. In Step 2, those gestures were analyzed according to the fulfilment of user and technical requirements for gesture interaction derived from previous literature. Gestures fitting those requirements were selected for a final gesture set of 6 gestures covering the three robot commands. Finally, Step 3 evaluated the intuitiveness of the final gesture set with BVI users. Results are discussed regarding accessible human robot interaction and future research in gesture control of BVI users."

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