Remote Control of Mobile Robots through Human Eye Gaze:The Design and Evaluation of an Interface

摘要

Controlling mobile robots remotely requires the operator to monitor the status of the robot through some sort offeedback. Assuming a vision based feedback system is used the operator is required to closely monitor the images whilenavigating the robot in real time. This will engage the eyes and the hands of the operator. Since the eyes are engaged inthe 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 madebetween monitoring and commanding. This paper presents a novel means of constructing a user interface to meet thischallenge. A range of solutions are constructed by augmenting the visual feedback with command regions to investigatethe extent to which a user can intuitively control the robot. An experimental platform comprising a mobile robot togetherwith cameras and eye-gaze system is constructed. The design of the system allows control of the robot, control ofonboard cameras and control of the interface through eye-gaze. A number of tasks are designed to evaluate the proposedsolutions. This paper presents the design considerations and the results of the evaluation. Overall it is found that theproposed solutions provide effective means of successfully navigating the robot for a range of tasks.