Virtual Reality and Human-Drone Interaction applied to the Construction and Execution of Flight Paths

This article presents a system architecture that integrates the construction, execution, and monitoring of three-dimensional flight paths for drones using virtual reality (VR). In this work, we propose a system that allows the construction and execution of flight paths by people who lack experience in drone piloting. For this purpose, the integration of two computational modules is introduced into the system architecture. On the one hand, the VR module allows the user to define three-dimensional flight paths in a VR scenario by using Human-Drone interactive techniques, while on the other hand, the Control module performs the supervised execution of these paths in an outdoor scenario using a smartphone that connects to a drone. Therefore, a system based on this architecture was developed and tested through two types of tests. The first one involves real user interaction to evaluate the usability of these computational modules (construction, execution, and runtime monitoring of flight paths). The second type consists of precision tests that are carried out to evaluate the accuracy between the path planned in VR and the one executed in the real scenario.

I. Introduction

With the advancement of current technology, the development and access to tele-operated devices equipped with image and video capture of real-world scenarios have improved. It has been stated that the use of these unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) has significantly increased over the last few years for different purposes such as photography and advertising, exploring emergency situations and natural disasters, surveillance and security, package delivery services, sports events and entertainment, or any other flight application.