Mapping Safe Zones for Co-located Human-UAV Interaction

TL;DR

This study maps safe and comfortable zones for co-located drones around humans, identifying distance thresholds to prevent discomfort and establishing no-fly, moderate-fly, and safe-fly zones through indoor experiments.

Contribution

The paper introduces empirical data on safe distances for single and multiple drones near humans, aiding in the development of trust zones for human-robot coexistence.

Findings

Discomfort occurs below 200 cm distance.

Moderate fly zone is 200-300 cm.

Safe fly zone is beyond 300 cm, extended further for multiple drones.

Abstract

Recent advances in robotics bring us closer to the reality of living, co-habiting, and sharing personal spaces with robots. However, it is not clear how close a co-located robot can be to a human in a shared environment without making the human uncomfortable or anxious. This research aims to map safe and comfortable zones for co-located aerial robots. The objective is to identify the distances at which a drone causes discomfort to a co-located human and to create a map showing no-fly, moderate-fly, and safe-fly zones. We recruited a total of 18 participants and conducted two indoor laboratory experiments, one with a single drone and the other set with two drones. Our results show that multiple drones cause more discomfort when close to a co-located human than a single drone. We observed that distances below 200 cm caused discomfort, the moderate fly zone was 200 - 300 cm, and the safe-fly zone was any distance greater than 300 cm in single drone experiments. The safe zones were pushed further away by 100 cm for the multiple drone experiments. In this paper, we present the preliminary findings on safe-fly zones for multiple drones. Further work would investigate the impact of a higher number of aerial robots, the speed of approach, direction of travel, and noise level on co-located humans, and autonomously develop 3D models of trust zones and safe zones for co-located aerial swarms.