Conceptual design of human-drone communication in collaborative environments

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Autonomous robots and drones will work collaboratively and cooperatively in tomorrow’s industry and agriculture. Before this becomes a reality, some form of standardised communication between man and machine must be established that specifically facilitates communication between autonomous machines and both trained and un-trained human actors in the working environment. We present preliminary results on a human-drone and a drone-human language situated in the agricultural industry where interactions with trained and untrained workers and visitors can be expected. We present basic visual indicators enhanced with flight patterns for drone-human interaction and human signaling based on aircraft marshalling for humane-drone interaction. We discuss preliminary results on image recognition and future work