Development of an eye-gaze controlled interface for surgical manipulators using eye-tracking glasses

Abstract

Introducing robots into the operating theatre has become more popular in recent decades. Surgical manipulators have been developed to assist in surgeries like a human assistant to facilitate the surgical procedures. In this paper, we present an eye-controlled interface for the surgeon to control this kind of robot based on eye-tracking glasses. In our approach, we use the monitor for providing the endoscopic/laparoscopic feedback as the landmark for controlling the robot. The surgeon is allowed to control the robot by looking at different features of the monitor. We present the algorithm for extracting the monitor from the user's view and the method on how to differentiate the control commands with the detected monitor and the user's gaze-point. Experiments were conducted to verify the feasibility of our eye-controlled interface.