GPA-Teleoperation: Gaze Enhanced Perception-Aware Safe Assistive Aerial Teleoperation

Gaze isan intuitive and direct way to represent the intentions of an individual. However, when it comes to assistive aerial teleoperation which aims to perform operators’ intention, rare attention has been paid to gaze. Existing methods obtain intention directly from the remote controller (RC) input, which is unfriendly to non-professional operators, as the experimental results show in
Section VI-C
. Further, most teleoperation works do not consider environment perception which is vital to guarantee safety. In this letter, we present GPA-Teleoperation, a gaze enhanced perception-aware assistive teleoperation framework, which addresses the above issues systematically. We capture the intention utilizing gaze information, and generate a topological path matching it. Then we refine the path into a safe and feasible trajectory which simultaneously enhances the perception awareness to the environment which the operator is interested in. Additionally, the proposed method is integrated into a customized quadrotor system. Extensive challenging indoor and outdoor real-world experiments and benchmark comparisons verify that the proposed system is reliable, robust and applicable to even unskilled users.