IT’S no Picasso, but it’s a start. A robotic arm that can be controlled with your eyes has just painted its first picture: a simple image of a house, grass and the sun.
Developed by Aldo Faisal of Imperial College London and his team, it extends the human body by providing a third, artificial arm. “It’s the first step to human augmentation with additional limbs,” says Faisal.
The arm uses an off-the-shelf eye-tracker to follow a person’s gaze, sending instructions for movement depending on how and where the painter looks. The commands can move the arm instantly using, for example, fixed gazes and sequences of prolonged blinks. A person can get it to paint a horizontal line by staring at a start point and then an end point.
Sabine Dziemian, a student who provided the eyes for the first creation, says that she didn’t need any training. “It feels natural to look where you want to draw,” she says.
John Paulin Hansen of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, who is currently developing drones that follow a controller’s gaze, thinks such a system is an obvious candidate for operating a robot. “Gaze control will be integrated into phones and tablets within the next couple of years,” he says. “It will soon become a part of everyday life.”
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