A 6-DOF Telexistence Drone Controlled by a Head Mounted Display

Recently, a new form of telexistence is achieved by recording images with cameras on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and displaying them to the user via a head mounted display (HMD). A key problem here is how to provide a free and natural mechanism for the user to control the viewpoint and watch a scene. To this end, we propose an improved rate-control method with an adaptive origin update (AOU) scheme. Without the aid of any auxiliary equipment, our scheme handles the self-centering problem. In addition, we present a full 6-DOF viewpoint control method to manipulate the motion of a stereo camera, and we build a real prototype to realize this by utilizing a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) which not only provides 2-DOF to the camera but also compensates the jittering motion of the UAV to record more stable image streams.