Bilateral Human-Robot Control for Semi-Autonomous UAV Navigation

This video demonstrates the work towards a novel control architecture for UAV navigation. In general, UAVs are not easy to operate and skilled pilots are required for a good performance in manual flight. However, currently it is impossible to capture every possible situation an UAV could encounter in the autonomous control. To avoid overly complicated control, a semi-autonomous control approach can be used, so the drone is partly autonomously and partly manually piloted. The novelty of the approach presented here is in the way this semi-autonomy is defined.

As the UAV regularly operates autonomously, it is not desirable to switch to manual control in dangerous procedures. Instead, a more supervisory method of control can be applied in which the UAV is always controlled by the onboard computer, but the boundaries of control are controlled by the operator. Whenever a situation requires bigger risks, the operator is informed requested by the drone for help, which he\she can offer by softening certain boundaries of the UAV.

This video demonstrates the concept.