Controlling a rover with your eyes

posted Dec 8th 2008 2:01pm by Caleb Kraft
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]

Comments [11]

tagged: eye tracking, rover, telemetry

Reader Comments

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

Posted at 2:07 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by macegr

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

Posted at 3:08 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by Bryan

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.

Posted at 3:33 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by macegr

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.

Posted at 4:22 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by ribblem

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.

Posted at 4:31 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by Dan

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

Posted at 4:34 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by Dan

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

Posted at 6:45 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by omikun

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

Posted at 7:15 pm on Dec 8th, 2008 by CC

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

Posted at 2:43 am on Dec 9th, 2008 by bob

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)