Haptic Teleoperation

Haptic Teleoperation for UAVs

Although huge advances have been accomplished in the research for fully autonomous UAVs, human teleoperated UAVs remain a good alternative due to the still unsolved issues and security constrains related to the fully autonomous ones. Still it is important to aid the operator in his tasks as much as possible, by providing him useful information and making the operation more intuitive. Even more, it is necessary to minimize the risk of human mistakes. In this work collision-free haptic teleoperation is accomplished using monocular vision for obstacle detection. A human pilot is able to command the UAV giving angle references from a haptic joystick in delta configuration. A simple controller was implemented to assist the human user in his task by automatically keeping the final effector at its center position. Potential field methodology is used to prevent collisions. Once an object is detected by the vision algorithm within certain security zone, a repulsive force is exerted by the haptic device to inform the pilot about the danger. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed approaches.