Starting off a new project, that seems rocket science but is not that hard, contributions are welcome....
its nothing new,, Students of university of zurich have already accomplished such a project

my action plan is to use an xbox(a second hand thing), hack it and to use the open source kinect sensor to identify gesture,
the system can be further used for mapping buildings and autopath finder features in compact areas,

first thing will be to select a suitable size of the copter, i'm going with a 250 size copter from my fav. HS quadkopters and will list the action plan in next post,
anyone worked on such a project?or has some piece of advice for me? forum heros i need you here 

I had made a gesture controlled car for the iit fest magneto competition...you could modify a cheap transmitter and replace the gimbals with analog accelerometers (ADXL 345) Rather than making a new gesture remote which would be a headache as you have to find ways to generate ppm signal transmit it without any loss of data and stuff...modifying a tx would be easier...

So we'll start with 1)quad built or arduino
2)xbee transmition
And finally 3) kinect coordinates

Materials:
All basic quadcopter parts except controller
Arduino uno
Mpu6050 gyro and accelerometer
4 xbee 1mw wire antenna (since a single thing would do only 2 channels
2 xbee USB adapter for arduino uno
And of course xbox kinect for windows

Has anyone done any project with kinect before?
Like a robotic arm controlled with kinect coordinates or something?

Himadri we are talking of gesture controlled copter, our hand gestures will control the copter, not any tilt in radio,
Good idea though, will look forward to such projects too once I'm done with this

Mount the accelerometer on a glove it becomes a gesture controlled robot Here's my bot in action

That was something really cool indeed

yes himdari ur right mount the sensor on a glove. but what I was thinking was the tilt sensor is 3 axis device. how can we use it to control a 6 axis quad.

You could use both your hands and two accelerometers, right hand for the direction of motion(left, right, front, back) left hand for throttle up and down to control up down motion and combining this with some practise the quad should be steerable! 

while using both hands, what will happen if you need to scratch your head?   

The same think happened to me when i took the robot for the competition at iit b...i was holding the battery in one hand and remote on other and then my head began itching and with the remote on i scratched my head and my bot went for a disco dance 

Or you could use the force sensors or flex sensors on the same hand and the throttle could be decided by how much you close or open your fist!   

well I built the same robot using an 8051 mc, its really ice. but I used two controllers. I tied some wires to the transmit end controller such that it would fit in the waist belt. n I used a 9v battery to power this mc. so that my other hand would be free to scratch my head. but using two sensors will require a lot of practice. pleas the range of zigbee is less. if we want long range it ll cost more. I don ve any experience in arduino. can we interface two sensors to one uno. I mean each sensor had got three outputs.

Arduino has 6 analog inputs so it s possible to connect the 2 accl..

Arduino can connect more than 99 slave modules Via I²C.

Well, I realised that accelerometer was indeed reliable, but somehow the 3rd axis was not very responsive, are you sure 2 will do a good job?

@Ribz instead of using two accl use a flex sensor on the finger to control the throttle and on the same hand use the accel to control the direction of motion of quad...this would be simpler and no problem would happen if your head itches  
Link for Flex Sensor:
http://www.rhydolabz.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=137_143&products_id=673&zenid=e600287ced111ca94159d646ac1612e3
 

Well flex sensor are not so reliable. they tends to wear too fast. you use it 10-20 times it ll start showing age. also they are expensive, so replacement will be a problem, unless one has a very big pocket.

can the same be done with an apm(gesture controlled setup by acc.'s)and can it handle some xbee antennas?
can we use ultrasonic sensors with apm?

seems this guy just used 4 ultrasonics with apm

Me too Done this already using ultrasonic like collision avoidance.
But ultrasonic range finders are not efficient and have too much blind spot.

not worth it? using 4 or more?

Do you Asking about coalition detection or gesture controlling?

No way for gesture controlling, because sonar can only monitor distance.

For coalition detection works but not efficient, because one sonar can only monitor less than 15 degree  angle.

Plus if U put multiple sensors then your processing time will increase. say if you are using 4 sensors, then you ve to assign all of them no. wise, one after another. now the controller will read the value of the first sensor then it ll go for the rest of all, so this will be repeated inside a loop. say if there is an obstacle at one sensor end, and the controller is reading some other sensor then it ll be of no use. though the controller process the information very fast in terms of miliseconds, but I am talking about worst case scenario.

 Please ,Do not entertain this character ribz,robin,robby .
ignore him he is a cheat , do not waste your time with him.
read here post 249 onwards http://www.rcindia.org/for-sale/beware-of-dealing-with-these-people/225/