Recently, human - machine interaction (HMI) becomes a hot research topic because of its wide applications, ranging from automatic device control to designing and development of assistant robot or even smart building at sparser scale. One of the most important questions in this research field is finding out an efficient and natural method of HMI. Among several channels of communication, hand gestures have been shown to be an intuitive and efficient mean to express an idea or to control something. In this paper, we propose a framework to study the behavior of Vietnamese in using of hand gesture in communication with robot. This study allows designing a hand gesture vocabulary for human - robot interaction (HRI) applications. This makes our twofold contributions: (1) a general framework of studying and designing an interaction protocol between human and robot, (2) a basic set of hand gestures that can be used in general situation of HRI. This set of hand gestures has been shown to satisfy both criteria: intuitiveness and recognisability.