Drone Brush: Mixed Reality Drone Path Planning

In this paper we present Drone Brush, a prototype mixed reality interface for immersive planning of drone paths for tasks such as collaborative photogrammetry and inspection. This interface employs Microsoft's HoloLens 2 to allow users to draw paths for drone navigation in 3D using hand gestures. Users can place waypoints with a simple pinch gesture, and similarly, delete and move existing waypoints. To validate paths, we leverage the HoloLens spatial map to check for potential collisions ahead of time, greatly reducing the likelihood of a collision during drone navigation. Paths are simplified and cleaned up using density-based clustering to prevent complex or redundant drone movement. In this Late-Breaking Report, we present the design and implementation of our system that integrates mixed reality, natural hand gestures, and drone path planning, which we plan to evaluate in a user study in the near future.