Force Field-Based Indirect Manipulation Of UAV Flight Trajectories

For a variety of applications remote navigation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) along a flight trajectory is an essential task. For instance, during search and rescue missions in outdoor scenes, an important goal is to ensure safe navigation. Assessed by the remote operator, this could mean avoiding collisions with obstacles, but moreover avoiding hazardous flight areas. State of the art approaches enable navigation along trajectories, but do not allow for indirect manipulation during motion. In addition, they suggest to use egocentric views which could limit understanding of the remote scene. With this work we introduce a novel indirect manipulation method, based on gravitational law, to recover safe navigation in the presence of hazardous flight areas. The indirect character of our method supports manipulation at far distances where common direct manipulation methods typically fail. We combine it with an immersive exocentric view to improve understanding of the scene. We designed three flavors of our method and compared them during a user study in a simulated scene. While with this method we present a first step towards a more extensive navigation interface, as future work we plan experiments in dynamic real-world scenes.