Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

Using nothing more than blinks and glances, it’s possible to manipulate a robotic arm well enough to paint a simple picture.

Dr. Aldo Faisal of Imperial College London’s Departments of Computing and Bioengineering successfully demonstrated a system that lets a human user control a paintbrush-wielding robot arm using only his or her eyes. He suggests this might lay the foundation for humanity's future of robot-enabled multitasking.

Using technology that tracks the user’s eyes, the robot is able to receive and understand a variety of commands, even to clean the paintbrush and prepare it with a different color. Once the robot is holding a paint-dabbed brush, it’s apparently pretty intuitive to use. Sabine Dziemian, a postgraduate in Faisal’s research group, says, "If I want to draw a straight line, I look at the start point and the end point, and the robot moves the brush across that line."

Blinking three times puts the robot in color selection mode, in which it moves the brush over to a variety of pre-dispensed colors. At that point, the user only needs to look at the color he or she wants to use next, and the arm applies the color to the brush...

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