People with Motor Disabilities Using Gaze to Control Telerobots

Abstract

Telerobots may give people with motor disabilities access to education, events and places. Eye-gaze interaction with these robots is an option when hands are not functional. Gaze control of telerobots has not yet been evaluated by people from this target group. We conducted a field study with five users in a care-home to investigate their preferences and challenges when driving telerobots via our gaze-controlled robotic telepresence system. We used a Wizard of Oz method to explore gaze and speech interaction, and experience prototyping to consider robot designs and types of displays (e.i. monitors versus head-mounted displays).