UAV, come to me: End-to-end, multi-scale situated HRI with an uninstrumented human and a distant UAV

We present the first demonstration of end-to-end far-to-near situated interaction between an uninstrumented human user and an initially distant outdoor autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The user uses an arm-waving gesture as a signal to attract the UAV's attention from a distance. Once this signal is detected, the UAV approaches the user using appearance-based tracking until it is close enough to detect the human's face. Once in this close-range interaction setting, the user is able to use hand gestures to communicate its commands to the UAV. Throughout the interaction, the UAV uses colored-light-based feedback to communicate its intent to the user. We developed this system to work reliably with a low-cost consumer UAV, with only computation off-board. We describe each component of this interaction system, giving details of the depth estimation strategy and the cascade predictive flight controller for approaching the user. We also present experimental results on the performance of the complete system and its individual components.