Pukyong National University

’Invented a drone control system with only hand gestures’
A result of PKNU Students ... Awarded ’Gold Prize’ at Hanium Contest held by the Ministry of Science and ICT

△ Award winners (From the right, Hwang Joon-ho, Lim Hyeon-jeong, Kim Ha-young) ⓒPhoto by Lee Sung-jae (PR team)

The students of Pukyong National University are drawing public attention by developing a system that can control the drone by hand gestures only.

It is ’a Development of Cluster Flight System of Drones through Image Processing Analysis’ of the 4th year students team of Hwang Joon-ho(26), Lim Hyeon-jeong(29) and Kim Ha-young(26) at Computer Engineerings department.

The system won the Gold Prize of 4 million won in the 2019 Han-Eum Contest, which was recently held under auspices of the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and hosted by the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) and the Federation of Korean Information Industries (FKII).

The system was developed with the help of Professor Jeong Soon-ho (Dept. of Computer Engineering), and a mentor CEO Park Jeong-seok of edgeiLab, which is the embedded system-related company. The system is designed to recognize the user’s hand gestures with the camera, convert it into a command signal from the server, and deliver it to the drone, which will then perform the correct action.

In general, a smartphone or a separate control device is required to control a drone whereas, the system developed by the student is characterized by the fact that the user can easily and conveniently control the drone using only a hand gesture using Bluetooth communication.

For example, if the user raises the thumb up, the drone takes off and lands when user closes the fist. Users can control it with both hands, and can specify hand gestures for each movement in advance and control them individually for each drone, or control multiple drones at once.

Hwang Joon-ho said, "In the test, we connected four drones to one server and controlled them, but with a repeater we can control hundreds of them. This system can be applied on a small budget, so it is expected to be used for various purposes such as directing drone shows at various events." <Pukyong Today>



△  Demonstrations of a Clust Flight System of Drones.