Controlling a rover with your eyes

posted Dec 8th 2008 2:01pm by
filed under: robots hacks

Controlling a robot simply by looking at your desired location is pretty freaking awesome. A web camera pointed at your face, analyzes your movements and pupil direction to send the bot signals. Look at a location and the bot goes, change your expression to send other commands to the bot. This easily surpasses the laser guided assistance droid for ease of use.

[via BotJunkie]



11 Responses to Controlling a rover with your eyes

  • macegr says:

    This is not a good system to have in operation near any attractive women.

  • Bryan says:

    I see no webcam…did i miss something? the point is that the man sitting in front of the monitor looks at an edge of the monitor the steer the drone, but i see no kind of camera watching him…? what did i miss

  • macegr says:

    bryan: they were using an off the shelf eye tracker, it’s that bar mounted below the monitor. You can see spots from the IR emitters in this video. They say their *next* version will use a webcam to track the eyes.

  • ribblem says:

    I wouldn’t say that this “easily surpasses the laser guided assistance droid for ease of use.” I think both are probably pretty easy to use and both have use cases where they excel.

  • Dan says:

    if you look close at the screen he is looking at, you can see that it is controlled by a mouse. There for it is not controlled by his eyes.

  • Dan says:

    actually i guess it could be his eyes controlling the mouse.

  • omikun says:

    They really leveraged existing technology to do it all in just 2 hours. I wonder for what part did they use the lego parts?

  • CC says:

    There would appear to be sme sort of sensor array at the bottom of the screen. The webcam is used on the “robot” itself.

  • bob says:

    Damn it, I’ve been meaning to do this for ages. Seems a lot more practical than shining lasers into one’s pupils.

  • Dennis says:

    They are not using a webcam, they are using special eytracker hardware. Possibly one made by Tobii (http://www.tobii.com/archive/pages/17746/tobii_x120_eye_tracker.aspx)

  • martin says:

    the eye tracker comes from SensoMotoric Instruments, see http://www.smivision.com

    more information on the project can be found here:

    http://alexandre.alapetite.net/divers/robot/mobile-laptop2/index.en.html

    http://martintall.com/video/gazerobot/

    and gaze interaction in general,
    http://gazeinteraction.blogspot.com

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