Virtual Reality Simulation of a Quadrotor to Monitor Dependent People at Home

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent an assistance solution for home care of dependent persons. These aircraft can cover the home, accompany the person, and position themselves to take photographs that can be analyzed to determine the person's mood and the assistance needed. In this context, this work principally aims to design a tool to aid in the development and validation of the navigation algorithms of an autonomous vision-based UAV for monitoring dependent people. For that, a distributed architecture has been proposed based on the real-time communication of two modules, one of them in charge of the dynamics of the UAV, the trajectory planning and the control algorithms, and the other devoted to visualizing the simulation in an immersive virtual environment. Thus, a system has been developed that allows the evaluation of the behavior of the assistant UAV from a technological point of view, as well as to carry out studies from the assisted person's viewpoint. An initial validation of a quadrotor model monitoring a virtual character demonstrates the advantages of the proposed system, which is an effective, safe and adaptable tool for the development of vision-based UAVs to help dependents at home.

Feeling of Safety and Comfort Towards a Socially Assistive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle That Monitors People in a Virtual Home

“…As mentioned in Section 3, the UAV Simulator described in [16] has been extended to include the different options for the relative monitoring altitude, the monitoring velocity and the monitoring radius.…”

“…Unlike our previous work described in [16], and due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic regarding the use of head mounted equipment covering the face of the users, three videos were created showcasing the different alternatives considered for relative monitoring altitude, monitoring velocity and monitoring radius. The participants received an email with a short description of the study and a link to an online questionnaire including the videos and some questions about it.…”

“…At this respect, it should be mentioned that: (i) this UAV Simulator is part of a virtual reality platform developed by our research group, whose operation will be explained in Section 4; (ii) the dynamics of the quadrotor and the generalised proportional integral (GPI) controller can be consulted in a previous work [22]. Regarding the trajectory planner, the initial versions [16,23] were designed for a circular monitoring path at a constant height defined by the person's head. However, to carry out the study of the influence of the above-mentioned parameters in the safety and comfort of the monitored user, it has been necessary to implement a new trajectory planner algorithm which will be detailed next.…”

“…This section describes in the detail the states that compose the new trajectory planner for the monitoring process considering an ellipsoidal path around the monitored person. In the previous version of the planner [16], the path around the person was circular. It is worth mentioning that this particular case can also be implemented using the equations described below simply by taking R x = R y .…”

“…To date, trust regarding older adults' adoption of assistive technology has been determined in several ways, including whether the elderly feels safe and comfortable with the proposed solution [12][13][14][15]. The evaluation of these variables requires advanced physical prototyping or, as an alternative, virtual reality (VR) as a simulation tool allows for fast, flexible and iterative testing processes [16][17][18].…”