Mobile Robot Used in Phase One: The mobile robot used in phase one of the research is a modified powered wheelchair base. It is equipped with an onboard low power consumption PC, a Netburner controller and two IP based Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras. The whole system is designed to be controlled remotely through wireless networking. Therefore the system is configured as a local area network where each individual component has its IP address and can be reached through the main IP of the robot network.
The onboard computer is a low power consumption PC which is meant to perform some low cost real time data processing. However, for the research the PC works only as a switch to handle the communication IPs and ports for each individual component. In addition to that it is used to turn the robot on and to start supplying power to all other components of the system onboard.
The onboard cameras are VIVOTEK Wireless Dual-Codec Network Camera with Pan/Tilt/Zoom. The Pan/Tilt/Zoom capabilities can be controlled remotely through the established communication between the camera and the remote controller which, in this case, is a remote PC. These cameras are able to transfer both video and audio at a maximum rate of 25 frames per second. However, no audio is being used in any of the experiments that have been carried out until the current status of the research.
The following video shows the robotic platform used in phase one of the research:
| Mobile Robot of Phase One |
Mobile Robot Used in Phase Two: In order to update to a more standardized robotic platform, the mobile robot component of the system was replaced with a Pioneer 3-DX robot from Mobile Robots which we named GazeBot as part of the TeleGaze system. The hardware components of GazeBot is similar to the previous robotic platform. It is Wi-Fi enabled, has an onboard PC and equipped with a video camera which is mounted on a Pan/Tilt unit. The only difference is that GazeBot is equipped with only one camera unlike the previous platform which is equipped with two cameras.
The following video shows the robotic platform used in phase two of the research:
| Mobile Robot of Phase Two |
Eye Tracking System: The eye gaze tracking system is one of the commercial eye gaze tracking systems produced by the Applied Science Laboratories in the USA. The system is basically transmitting infrared lights to the eye of the user and captures high resolution images of the eye. The images are processed to extract the reflections of the transmitted infrared lights in order to calculate the actual point of the gaze on the screen. This could be achieved after a calibration procedure each time a user uses the system.