Recently, various applications of robot system become more popular in accordance with rapid development of computer hardware/software, artificial intelligence, and automatic control technology. Formerly robots mainly have been used in industrial field, however, nowadays it is said that the robot will do an important role in the home service application. To make the robot more useful, we require further researches on implementation of natural communication method between the human and the robot system, and autonomous behavior generation. The gesture recognition technique is one of the most convenient methods for natural human-robot interaction, so it is to be solved for implementation of intelligent robot system. In this paper, we describe the state-of-the-art of advanced gesture recognition technologies for intelligent robots according to three methods; sensor based method, feature based method, appearance based method, and 3D model based method. And we also discuss some problems and real applications in the research field.