2017
A framework for natural human drone communication covering control, intent and social interaction.
Natural Human Drone Interactions
More than 770,000 U.S. drone registrations have been filed in about 15 months and over 100,000 drones have been registered in April 2017 alone. A big challenge caused by this increase, is the need for public acceptance and autonomy of drone operation in complex and messy environments, specifically in direct engagement with humans. Unlike pixels on a screen, drones are physical objects that occupy the same space as humans and can interact with us through lighting, motion, sound, or physical contact.
The project creates a richer interaction vocabulary between humans and flying robots taking into account human emotion recognition and translating the aerial robot’s physical characteristics into interpretable motions. A Parrot AR drone was used, which is a low cost and highly customisable quadcopter. Flight animation gestures such as motion, roll, pitch, yaw, angular and vertical speed as well as takeoff, landing and LED animations can be controlled directly by the API using NodeJS.
Autonomy
I prototyped aerial robotics choreographies based on human reactions. The video feed from the front camera of the quadcopter was captured and was analysed by the Affectiva Emotion Analysis SDK. Five basic facial human expressions, namely joy, anger, surprise, sadness, and fear were detected and the result was sent back to the computer. Five corresponding drone reactions or animated software scripts were then initiated as a response. Instead of anthropomorphism, the drone communicates with what it’s got–movement that is, it's position, direction compared to the user, speed, rotation, angles, altitude as well as light.
For example, when someone is afraid, the drone slows and drops low to the ground, it makes no fast movements and backs off. When someone is surprised, the drone approaches them almost slowly investigating, backing off, and then approaching again. Those interactions were inspired by cybernetics (Braitenberg vehicles), dance (Labanotation system), animation principles, human-robot interaction as well as by the interaction between falconers and their birds of prey.




