SwarmCloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors on Human Arms

TL;DR

SwarmCloak introduces a wearable system enabling a swarm of nano-quadrotors to land on human arms using light-sensitive pads and tactile feedback, enhancing human-swarm interaction.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel wearable tactile system combined with visual cues for precise drone landing on human arms, improving interaction intuitiveness.

Findings

Tactile feedback improves landing accuracy with more drones.

Combined visual and tactile feedback yields the best landing performance.

Tactile feedback enhances user convenience during drone landing tasks.

Abstract

We propose a novel system SwarmCloak for landing of a fleet of four flying robots on the human arms using light-sensitive landing pads with vibrotactile feedback. We developed two types of wearable tactile displays with vibromotors which are activated by the light emitted from the LED array at the bottom of quadcopters. In a user study, participants were asked to adjust the position of the arms to land up to two drones, having only visual feedback, only tactile feedback or visual-tactile feedback. The experiment revealed that when the number of drones increases, tactile feedback plays a more important role in accurate landing and operator's convenience. An important finding is that the best landing performance is achieved with the combination of tactile and visual feedback. The proposed technology could have a strong impact on the human-swarm interaction, providing a new level of intuitiveness and engagement into the swarm deployment just right from the skin surface.