Don't Drone Yourself in Work: Discussing DronOS as a Framework for Human-Drone Interaction

TL;DR

This paper discusses enhancements to DronOS, a flexible, community-driven framework for human-drone interaction that aims to simplify drone programming across different models and environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces new features to DronOS, enabling model-independent drone automation tailored for human-drone interaction research.

Findings

Enhanced DronOS supports multiple drone models.

Framework facilitates easier prototyping for researchers.

Aims to standardize human-drone interaction development.

Abstract

More and more off-the-shelf drones provide frameworks that enable the programming of flight paths. These frameworks provide vendor-dependent programming and communication interfaces that are intended for flight path definitions. However, they are often limited to outdoor and GPS-based use only. A key disadvantage of such a solution is that they are complicated to use and require readjustments when changing the drone model. This is time-consuming since it requires redefining the flight path for the new framework. This workshop paper proposes additional features for DronOS, a community-driven framework that enables model-independent automatisation and programming of drones. We enhanced DronOS to include additional functions to account for the specific design constraints in human-drone-interaction. This paper provides a starting point for discussing the requirements involved in designing a drone system with other researchers within the human-drone interaction community. We envision DronOS as a community-driven framework that can be applied to generic drone models, hence enabling the automatisation for any commercially available drone. Our goal is to build DronOS as a software tool that can be easily used by researchers and practitioners to prototype novel drone-based systems.