Hiroyuki Kajimoto

Jonathan Tirado, Vladislav Panov, Vibol Yem et al.

We present ElectroAR, a visual and tactile sharing system for hand skills training. This system comprises a head-mounted display (HMD), two cameras, tactile sensing glove, and electro-stimulation glove. The trainee wears a tactile sensing glove that gets pressure data from touching different objects. His movements are recorded by two cameras, which are located in front and top side of the workspace. In the remote site, the trainer wears the electro-tactile stimulation glove. This glove transforms the remotely collected pressure data to electro-tactile stimuli. Additionally, the trainer wears an HMD to see and guide the movements of the trainee. The key part of this project is to combine distributed tactile sensor and electro-tactile display to let the trainer understand what the trainee is doing. Results show our system supports a higher user recognition performance.

Evgeny Tsykunov, Ruslan Agishev, Roman Ibrahimov et al.

For the human operator, it is often easier and faster to catch a small size quadrotor right in the midair instead of landing it on a surface. However, interaction strategies for such cases have not yet been considered properly, especially when more than one drone has to be landed at the same time. In this paper, we propose a novel interaction strategy to land multiple robots on the human hands using vibrotactile feedback. We developed a wearable tactile display that is activated by the intensity of light emitted from an LED ring on the bottom of the quadcopter. We conducted experiments, where participants were asked to adjust the position of the palm to land one or two vertically-descending drones with different landing speeds, by having only visual feedback, only tactile feedback or visual-tactile feedback. We conducted statistical analysis of the drone landing positions, landing pad and human head trajectories. Two-way ANOVA showed a statistically significant difference between the feedback conditions. Experimental analysis proved that with an increasing number of drones, tactile feedback plays a more important role in accurate hand positioning and operator's convenience. The most precise landing of one and two drones was achieved with the combination of tactile and visual feedback.

Evgeny Tsykunov, Ruslan Agishev, Roman Ibrahimov et al.

We propose a novel system SwarmCloak for landing of a fleet of four flying robots on the human arms using light-sensitive landing pads with vibrotactile feedback. We developed two types of wearable tactile displays with vibromotors which are activated by the light emitted from the LED array at the bottom of quadcopters. In a user study, participants were asked to adjust the position of the arms to land up to two drones, having only visual feedback, only tactile feedback or visual-tactile feedback. The experiment revealed that when the number of drones increases, tactile feedback plays a more important role in accurate landing and operator's convenience. An important finding is that the best landing performance is achieved with the combination of tactile and visual feedback. The proposed technology could have a strong impact on the human-swarm interaction, providing a new level of intuitiveness and engagement into the swarm deployment just right from the skin surface.