Control of a Drone With Body Gestures

Abstract

Drones are becoming more popular within military applications and civil aviation by hobbyists and business. Achieving a natural Human-Drone Interaction (HDI) would enable unskilled drone pilots to take part in the flying of these devices and more generally easy the use of drones. The research within this paper focuses on the design and development of a Natural User Interface (NUI) allowing a user to pilot a drone with body gestures. A Microsoft Kinect was used to capture the user’s body information which was processed by a motion recognition algorithm and converted into commands for the drone. The implementation of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) gives feedback to the user. Visual feedback from the drone’s onboard camera is provided on a screen and an interactive menu controlled by body gestures and allowing the choice of functionalities such as photo and video capture or take-off and landing has been implemented. This research resulted in an efficient and functional system, more instinctive, natural, immersive and fun than piloting using a physical controller, including innovative aspects such as the implementation of additional functionalities to the drone's piloting and control of the flight speed.

Integrated Physical-Digital Workflow in Prototyping – Inspirations from the Digital Twin

“…They are now poised to reach ubiquity in the workplace (Deloitte, 2021;XR Association, 2020) and create a step-change in how engineers interact with products, with many emerging examples of application within recent years (Kent, Snider, Gopsill, et al, 2021). Recent work directly within the design domain has shown the potential and emergent value of these technologies for design development, including for MR (Kent, Snider, Gopsill, et al, 2021) and gesture control (Gio et al, 2021;Harlan et al, 2021). Immersive technologies then provide a lens and opportunity to explore how physical and digital models may be integrated for design prototyping, the integrated workflow opportunities that may be created, and if and how emergent benefits of working across domains may be realised.…”