Hand Gesture-based Wearable Human-Drone Interface for Intuitive Movement Control

Although Radio Control (RC) has been a dominant device for controlling a drone, it is known that a fair amount of training period is required to master it. One way to sidestep such an RC-based control scheme would be utilizing either Kinect or Leap Motion sensor by which the user interacts with a drone more naturally. In such cases, however, the pilot has to hang around the sensor since the operating distance of such sensors is rather short. In this study, we propose a new wearable human-drone interface embedded on a Raspberry Zero, by which even a novice can let the drone not only take-off, land and fly to the intended directions according his hand-pose gestures but also make diverse flying trajectories such as circle, square and spiral using a sequence of hand gestures. Results from Gazebo simulator and several field experiments combined with a personalized calibration program demonstrate the feasibility of its commercial applications.