Development and Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System for Novice Users

Abstract

With recent regulatory efforts to reduce restrictions placed on the operation of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in the United States, it is likely that in the next few years, these vehicles will become commonplace in the commercial marketplace as they are in military environments. In order to reduce the barrier to entry for operations of MAVs, customers of these systems will require ease of operation as well as minimal training time in order to reduce costs. To this end, a smartphone application was developed to control a quadrotor remotely in the exploration of an unknown environment, and tested for users with only three minutes of training. Initial motion capture room tests produced encouraging results for localization and target identification tasks, however, such environments are inherently artificial and the extensibility of such results is limited. A follow-on outdoor field study was conducted in order to compare the indoor and outdoor results and to assess operator performance in a realistic environment. Performance on the outdoor localization tasks was comparable to the indoor study, however, participants generally performed slightly worse on the target identification task in the outdoor experiment, attributed to camera image quality and GPS localization issues. Other issues such as wind and flight safety considerations are discussed. INTRODUCTIONSoldiers, Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) teams, and natural disaster first responders are examples of teams of people operating in dangerous and potentially hostile environments who quickly need information about their local environment. These personnel often quickly need aerial imagery of their environments to answer relatively simple questions such as "Is my path blocked?" or "Is there a threat on top of that building?"The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to support such personnel has become commonplace in the military and with recent regulatory rulings [1], will likely be increasing in the next few years in civilian sectors. Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) that weigh only a few pounds have also been introduced in these settings. However, both traditional small UAV and MAV systems require a dedicated operator with extensive training and control stations that require either a bulky laptop or a two handed controller that resembles popular gaming controllers.Personnel in these situations have a primary mission other than operating the vehicle, i.e., soldiers are looking for insurgents, first responders are searching for victims, etc. Requiring such operators to have a specialized skill set for operating a MAV or UAV, or requiring additional dedicated personnel to just operate the vehicles places additional demands on resources and could unnecessarily put more people at risk. Moreover, in order for such systems to become viable in the commercial marketplace, the control devices will need to be easy to use with minimal training and low operational costs.One solution to these problems is to make the control of such systems sufficiently intuitive so that al...

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