GPA-Teleoperation: Gaze Enhanced Perception-aware Safe Assistive Aerial Teleoperation

TL;DR

GPA-Teleoperation introduces a gaze-based, perception-aware framework for safe and intuitive aerial drone control, improving intention recognition and environmental safety in assistive teleoperation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel gaze-enhanced, perception-aware teleoperation system that improves intention detection and safety in aerial drone control, especially for non-professional users.

Findings

System is reliable and robust in indoor and outdoor environments.

Achieves better intention recognition compared to controller-based methods.

Demonstrates applicability to unskilled users.

Abstract

Gaze is an intuitive and direct way to represent the intentions of an individual. However, when it comes to assistive aerial teleoperation which aims to perform operators' intention, rare attention has been paid to gaze. Existing methods obtain intention directly from the remote controller (RC) input, which is inaccurate, unstable, and unfriendly to non-professional operators. Further, most teleoperation works do not consider environment perception which is vital to guarantee safety. In this paper, we present GPA-Teleoperation, a gaze enhanced perception-aware assistive teleoperation framework, which addresses the above issues systematically. We capture the intention utilizing gaze information, and generate a topological path matching it. Then we refine the path into a safe and feasible trajectory which simultaneously enhances the perception awareness to the environment operators are interested in. Additionally, the proposed method is integrated into a customized quadrotor system. Extensive challenging indoor and outdoor real-world experiments and benchmark comparisons verify that the proposed system is reliable, robust and applicable to even unskilled users. We will release the source code of our system to benefit related researches.