GPA-Teleoperation: Gaze Enhanced Perception-aware Safe Assistive Aerial Teleoperation
This work addresses safety and usability issues in assistive aerial teleoperation for operators, particularly non-professionals, by integrating gaze and environmental perception, though it is incremental as it builds on existing teleoperation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inaccurate and unsafe aerial teleoperation by introducing a framework that uses gaze to capture operator intention and generates safe, perception-aware trajectories. The result is a reliable and robust system validated through real-world experiments, making it applicable even to unskilled users.
Gaze is an intuitive and direct way to represent the intentions of an individual. However, when it comes to assistive aerial teleoperation which aims to perform operators' intention, rare attention has been paid to gaze. Existing methods obtain intention directly from the remote controller (RC) input, which is inaccurate, unstable, and unfriendly to non-professional operators. Further, most teleoperation works do not consider environment perception which is vital to guarantee safety. In this paper, we present GPA-Teleoperation, a gaze enhanced perception-aware assistive teleoperation framework, which addresses the above issues systematically. We capture the intention utilizing gaze information, and generate a topological path matching it. Then we refine the path into a safe and feasible trajectory which simultaneously enhances the perception awareness to the environment operators are interested in. Additionally, the proposed method is integrated into a customized quadrotor system. Extensive challenging indoor and outdoor real-world experiments and benchmark comparisons verify that the proposed system is reliable, robust and applicable to even unskilled users. We will release the source code of our system to benefit related researches.