A Gaze-based Bilateral Teleoperation Framework for a Team of Mobile Robots ^*

Utilizing the hand-based input with haptic feedback to interact with a robot team has attracted significant interest because of its high situational awareness. The main disadvantages of this interaction include insufficient teleoperation tasks due to the mechanical limitation of the haptic device, cognitive load caused by the contradiction between the highly-abstracted control command and the low-level control input, and added physical fatigue caused by intensive input operations. In this paper, we propose a novel interaction scheme for bilaterally teleoperating a group of mobile robots by combining the eye-gaze input with the hand input. In the scheme, the controller of the robot team is divided into main tasks and subtasks. The main tasks are finished by the master devices. The haptic device is utilized to receive the virtual force feedback and control the formation size and velocity. The eye tracker is used to generate the formation transition commands. The subtasks including obstacle avoidance and formation keeping are accomplished autonomously by the robot team. The experimental results show that the scheme is more acceptable, intuitive, and efficient compared with the traditional bilateral teleoperation scheme without gaze input.