USE OF EYE-TRACKING TO CONTROL A COBOT MOVEMENT: RESULTS COMING FROM THE APPLICATION OF TOBII PRO X2-30 TO AN OMRON TM5-700 ROBOT

Abstract

In this paper we present a connection setup to operate a collaborative robot (cobot) Omron TM5-700 by means of a Tobii Pro X2-30 eye-tracker. The application has been designed with the software OMRON TMFlow as well as the Tobii SDK (software development kit). The possibility to operate a collaborative robot by gaze can be used as a third arm, which permits to do more sophisticated activities by human beings but it can also facilitate the manipulation of dangerous or perilous substances, or in unsafe environments where the human being can stay far away of the dangerous area. It can be very useful for a plenty of safety and security applications. To demonstrate the correct operation of the cobot control application, we have implemented a practical demo and experimental setup. It consists of accuracy measurements, where the control of the position of the cobot is be defined by means of gaze, which defines a set of points in (X, Y) plane. Later on, the robot picks up an ink-pen and draw a graph in a piece of paper. This drawing consists of connecting these pre-defined dots by straights lines. To this aim, we have acquired a set of figures (parallelogram, pentagon, etc.), and compared the desired printed image on PC screen with the result produced by the cobot.