Detection of eye closing/opening from alpha-blocking in the EEG of occipital region has been used to build human-machine interfaces. This paper presents an alternative method for detection of eye closing/opening from EOG signals in an online setting. The accuracies for correct detection of eye closing and opening operations with the proposed techniques were found to be 95.6% and 91.9% respectively for 8 healthy subjects. These techniques were then combined with the detection of eye blinks, the accuracy of which turned out to be 96.9%. This was then used to build an interface for robotic arm control for a pick and place task. The same task was also carried out using a haptic device as a master. The speed and accuracy for these two methods were then compared to assess quantitatively the ease of using this interface. It appears that the proposed interface will be very useful for persons with neurodegenerative disorders who can perform eye closing/opening and eye blinks. © 2019 Nalecz Institute of Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences