Drone application for aerial manipulation is tested in such areas as industrial maintenance, supporting the rescuers in emergencies, and e-commerce. Most of such applications require teleoperation. The operator receives visual feedback from the camera installed on a robot arm or drone. As aerial manipulation requires delicate and precise motion of robot arm, the camera data delay, narrow field of view, and blurred image caused by drone dynamics can lead the UAV to crash. The paper focuses on the development of a novel teleoperation system for aerial manipulation using Virtual Reality (VR). The controlled system consists of UAV with a 4-DoF robotic arm and embedded sensors. VR application presents the digital twin of drone and remote environment to the user through a headmounted display (HMD). The operator controls the position of the robotic arm and gripper with VR trackers worn on the arm and tracking glove with vibrotactile feedback. Control data is translated directly from VR to the real robot in realtime. The experimental results showed a stable and robust teleoperation mediated by the VR scene. The proposed system can considerably improve the quality of aerial manipulations.

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Figure 1: a) Novel wearable haptic interface TouchVR. b) A CAD model of haptic display. c) MatrixTouch application. d) RoboX application. ABSTRACTTouchVR is a novel wearable haptic interface which can deliver multimodal tactile stimuli on the palm by DeltaTouch haptic display and vibrotactile feedback on the fingertips by vibration motors for the Virtual Reality (VR) user. DeltaTouch display is capable of generating 3D force vector at the contact point and presenting multimodal tactile sensation of weight, slippage, encounter, softness, and texture. The VR system consists of HTC Vive Pro base stations and head-mounted display (HMD), and Leap Motion controller for tracking the user's hands motion in VR. The MatrixTouch, BallFeel, and RoboX applications have been developed to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed technology. A novel haptic interface can potentially bring a new level of immersion of the user in VR and make it more interactive and tangible.

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