Co-design of forward-control and force-feedback methods for teleoperation of an unmanned aerial vehicle

Abstract

The core hypothesis of this ongoing research project is that co-designing haptic-feedback and forward-control methods for shared-control teleoperation will enable the operator to more readily understand the shared-control algorithm, better enabling him or her to work collaboratively with the shared-control technology.} This paper presents a novel method that can be used to co-design forward control and force feedback in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) teleoperation. In our method, a potential field is developed to quickly calculate the UAV's risk of collision online. We also create a simple proxy to represent the operator's confidence, using the swiftness with which the operator sends commands the to UAV. We use these two factors to generate both a scale factor for a position-control scheme and the magnitude of the force feedback to the operator. Currently, this methodology is being implemented and refined in a 2D-simulated environment. In the future, we will evaluate our methods with user study experiments using a real UAV in a 3D environment.Accepted manuscrip