Eye gaze tracking for a humanoid robot

Humans use eye gaze in their daily interaction with other humans. Humanoid robots, on the other hand, have not yet taken full advantage of this form of implicit communication. In this paper we present a passive monocular gaze tracking system implemented on the iCub humanoid robot. The validation of the system proved that it is a viable low-cost, calibration-free gaze tracking solution for humanoid platforms, with a mean absolute error of about 5 degrees on horizontal angle estimates. We also demonstrated the applicability of our system to human-robot collaborative tasks, showing that the eye gaze reading ability can enable successful implicit communication between humans and the robot. Finally, in the conclusion we give generic guidelines on how to improve our system and discuss some potential applications of gaze estimation for humanoid robots.