Remote control of mobile robots through human eye gaze: the design and evaluation of an interface

Abstract

Controlling mobile robots remotely requires the operator to monitor the status of the robot through some sort of feedback. Assuming a vision based feedback system is used the operator is required to closely monitor the images while navigating the robot in real time. This will engage the eyes and the hands of the operator. Since the eyes are engaged in the monitoring task anyway, their gaze can be used to navigate the robot in order to free the hands of the operator. However, the challenge here lies in developing an interaction interface that enables an intuitive distinction to be made between monitoring and commanding. This paper presents a novel means of constructing a user interface to meet this challenge. A range of solutions are constructed by augmenting the visual feedback with command regions to investigate the extent to which a user can intuitively control the robot. An experimental platform comprising a mobile robot together with cameras and eye-gaze system is constructed. The design of the system allows control of the robot, control of onboard cameras and control of the interface through eye-gaze. A number of tasks are designed to evaluate the proposed solutions. This paper presents the design considerations and the results of the evaluation. Overall it is found that the proposed solutions provide effective means of successfully navigating the robot for a range of tasks.