HRI in the sky: Creating and commanding teams of UAVs with a vision-mediated gestural interface

Extending our previous work in real-time vision-based Human Robot Interaction (HRI) with multi-robot systems, we present the first example of creating, modifying and commanding teams of UAVs by an uninstrumented human. To create a team the user focuses attention on an individual robot by simply looking at it, then adds or removes it from the current team with a motion-based hand gesture. Another gesture commands the entire team to begin task execution. Robots communicate among themselves by wireless network to ensure that no more than one robot is focused, and so that the whole team agrees that it has been commanded. Since robots can be added and removed from the team, the system is robust to incorrect additions. A series of trials with two and three very low-cost UAVs and off-board processing demonstrates the practicality of our approach.