An Augmented Reality Interaction Interface for Autonomous Drone
This work addresses the challenge of intuitive spatial interaction for operators of autonomous drones in unknown environments, representing an incremental improvement in interface design.
The researchers tackled the problem of human-drone interaction in autonomous navigation by developing an augmented reality interface that displays a 3D map from the drone and allows setting target positions via head gaze and hand gestures, with a user study conducted to evaluate performance.
Human drone interaction in autonomous navigation incorporates spatial interaction tasks, including reconstructed 3D map from the drone and human desired target position. Augmented Reality (AR) devices can be powerful interactive tools for handling these spatial interactions. In this work, we build an AR interface that displays the reconstructed 3D map from the drone on physical surfaces in front of the operator. Spatial target positions can be further set on the 3D map by intuitive head gaze and hand gesture. The AR interface is deployed to interact with an autonomous drone to explore an unknown environment. A user study is further conducted to evaluate the overall interaction performance.