Feeling the True Force in Haptic Telepresence for Flying Robots

Haptic feedback in teleoperation of flying robots can enable safe flight in unknown and densely cluttered environments. It is typically part of the robot's control scheme and used to aid navigation and collision avoidance via artificial force fields displayed to the operator. However, to achieve fully immersive embodiment in this context, high fidelity force feedback is needed. In this paper we present a telepresence scheme that provides haptic feedback of the external forces or wind acting on the robot, leveraging the ability of a state-of-the-art flying robot to estimate these values online. As a result, we achieve true force feedback telepresence in flying robots by rendering the actual forces acting on the system. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first telepresence scheme for flying robots that is able to feedback real contact forces and does not depend on their representations. The proposed event-based teleoperation scheme is stable under varying latency conditions. Secondly, we present a haptic interface design such that any haptic interface with at least as many force-sensitive and active degrees of freedom as the flying robot can implement this telepresence architecture. The approach is validated experimentally using a Skydio R1 autonomous flying robot in combination with a ForceDimension sigma.7 and a Franka Emika Panda as haptic devices.