GPA-Teleoperation: Gaze Enhanced Perception-aware Safe Assistive Aerial Teleoperation

Abstract

Gaze is an intuitive and direct way to represent the intentions of an individual. However, when it comes to assistive aerial teleoperation which aims to perform operators' intention, rare attention has been paid to gaze. Existing methods obtain intention directly from the remote controller (RC) input, which is inaccurate, unstable, and unfriendly to nonprofessional operators. Further, most teleoperation works do not consider environment perception which is vital to guarantee safety. In this paper, we present GPA-Teleoperation, a gaze enhanced perception-aware assistive teleoperation framework, which addresses the above issues systematically. We capture the intention utilizing gaze information, and generate a topological path matching it. Then we refine the path into a safe and feasible trajectory which simultaneously enhances the perception awareness to the environment operators are interested in. Additionally, the proposed method is integrated into a customized quadrotor system. Extensive challenging indoor and outdoor real-world experiments and benchmark comparisons verify that the proposed system is reliable, robust and applicable to even unskilled users. We will release the source code 1 of our system to benefit related researches. † Equal contribution.

Human-Guided Safe and Efficient Trajectory Replanning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

“…Besides, the Remote Controller (RC) is not a user-friendly interface to express human intent directly. Wang et al [14] adopt eye tracker and RC to capture users' expected direction and flight speed, respectively. One topological path will match extracted gaze point, and the path will be refined by following optimization module.…”