Gesture-Based Programming (GBP) is a form of programming by human demonstration. The process begins by observing a human demonstrate the task to be programmed. Observation of the human’s hand and fingertips is achieved through a sensorized glove with special tactile fingertips. The modular glove system senses hand pose, finger joint angles, and fingertip contact conditions.

The output of the GBP system is the executable program for performing the demonstrated task on the target hardware. This program consists of a network of encapsulated expertise agents of two flavors. The primary agents implement the primitives required to perform the task and come from the pool of primitives represented in the skill base. The secondary set of agents includes many of the same gesture recognition and interpretation agents used during the demonstration. These agents perform on-line observation of the human to allow supervised practicing of the task for further adaptation.