AgileX NERO robotic arm gains gesture control via OpenClaw skills

AgileX Robotics has published a tutorial demonstrating how to create an OpenClaw Skill for controlling the NERO robotic arm with simple natural language commands. The skill, named hands_ctrl, allows users to trigger three distinct physical actions: a handshake (shake), a wave (wave), and a recover/reset motion (recove). The implementation uses a Python script (hands_ctrl.py) that accepts command-line arguments for the desired action. It is designed to work within the OpenClaw agent framework, with a suggested multi-agent architecture but also compatible with standard workspaces. Safety is emphasized through an interruption handling mechanism: before executing a new gesture, any currently running hardware process is terminated gracefully with Ctrl+C (SIGINT) to prevent motor conflicts. The skill parses user intent from natural language (English or Chinese) and maps it to the appropriate action, executes the script with strict argument passing, and captures stdout/stderr for confirmation. The tutorial covers file structure, SKILL.md metadata, and a step-by-step workflow including intent analysis, process management, and execution verification.