Routine inspections for critical infrastructures such as bridges are required in most jurisdictions worldwide. Such routine inspections are largely visual in nature, which are qualitative, subjective, and not repeatable. Although robotic infrastructure inspections address such limitations, they cannot replace the superior ability of experts to make decisions in complex situations, thus making human-robot interaction systems a promising technology. This study presents a novel gaze-based human-robot interaction system, designed to augment the visual inspection performance through mixed reality. Through holograms from a mixed reality device, gaze can be utilized effectively to estimate the properties of the defect in real-time. Additionally, inspectors can monitor the inspection progress online, which enhances the speed of the entire inspection process. Limited controlled experiments demonstrate its effectiveness across various users and defect types. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the real-time application of eye gaze in civil infrastructure inspections.

翻译：全球大多数司法管辖区都需要对桥梁等关键基础设施进行例行检查。这类例行检查本质上以视觉为主，具有定性、主观且不可重复的特点。尽管机器人基础设施检测解决了这些局限性，但它们无法替代专家在复杂情况下做出决策的卓越能力，因此人机交互系统成为一项有前景的技术。本研究提出了一种新颖的基于凝视的人机交互系统，旨在通过混合现实增强视觉检测性能。通过混合现实设备生成的全息图像，可以有效利用凝视实时估计缺陷的属性。此外，检测人员可以在线监控检测进度，从而提升整个检测过程的速度。有限的控制实验证明了该系统在不同用户和缺陷类型中的有效性。据我们所知，这是眼动凝视在民用基础设施检测中的首次实时应用演示。