Controlling a Swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Full-Body k-Nearest Neighbor Based Action Classifier

The intuitive control of robot swarms becomes crucial when humans are working in close proximity with the swarm in unknown environments. In such operations, it is necessary to maintain the autonomy of the swarm while giving the human operator enough means to influence the decision-making process of the robots. This paper presents a human-swarm interaction approach using full-body action recognition to control an autonomous flock of unmanned aerial vehicles. We estimate the full-body pose of the human operator and use a k-nearest neighbor algorithm to classify the action made by the humans. Finally, the swarm uses the identified action to decide its goal direction. We demonstrate the practicality of our approach with a multi-stage experimental setup to evaluate the prediction accuracy and robustness of the system.