Spatial Assisted Human-Drone Collaborative Navigation and Interaction through Immersive Mixed Reality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mixed reality framework for human-drone collaboration, integrating spatial awareness and multi-modal interaction to improve task efficiency and safety in complex environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel bi-directional spatial awareness system and a multi-modal interaction approach for immersive human-drone collaboration using mixed reality.

Findings

Successful collaborative planning and exploration with drones in MR environments

Enhanced obstacle avoidance through integrated planning algorithms

Effective virtual-physical interaction enabling seamless control

Abstract

Aerial robots have the potential to play a crucial role in assisting humans with complex and dangerous tasks. Nevertheless, the future industry demands innovative solutions to streamline the interaction process between humans and drones to enable seamless collaboration and efficient co-working. In this paper, we present a novel tele-immersive framework that promotes cognitive and physical collaboration between humans and robots through Mixed Reality (MR). This framework incorporates a novel bi-directional spatial awareness and a multi-modal virtual-physical interaction approaches. The former seamlessly integrates the physical and virtual worlds, offering bidirectional egocentric and exocentric environmental representations. The latter, leveraging the proposed spatial representation, further enhances the collaboration combining a robot planning algorithm for obstacle avoidance with a variable admittance control. This allows users to issue commands based on virtual forces while maintaining compatibility with the environment map. We validate the proposed approach by performing several collaborative planning and exploration tasks involving a drone and an user equipped with a MR headset.