Haptic Teleoperation of UAVs through Control Barrier Functions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a CBF-based haptic feedback system for UAV teleoperation that enhances safety and reduces workload, demonstrated through a user study comparing it with other methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel CBF-based approach for generating haptic feedback to improve safe UAV control during teleoperation.

Findings

CBF-based feedback improves safety in UAV teleoperation

Participants experienced reduced workload with CBF feedback

Task efficiency was maintained with the proposed method

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to haptic teleoperation. Specifically, we use control barrier functions (CBFs) to generate force feedback to help human operators safely fly quadrotor UAVs. CBFs take a control signal as input and output a control signal that is as close as possible to the initial control signal, while also meeting specified safety constraints. In the proposed method, we generate haptic force feedback based on the difference between a command issued by the human operator and the safe command returned by a CBF. In this way, if the user issues an unsafe control command, the haptic feedback will help guide the user towards the safe input command that is closest to their current command. We conducted a within-subject user study, in which 12 participants flew a simulated UAV in a virtual hallway environment. Participants completed the task with our proposed CBF-based haptic feedback, no haptic feedback, and haptic feedback generated via parametric risk fields, which is a state-of-the-art method described in the literature. The results of this study show that CBF-based haptic feedback can improve a human operator's ability to safely fly a UAV and reduce the operator's perceived workload, without sacrificing task efficiency.