Aerial Manipulation using a Human-Embodied Drone Interface

This paper presents a human-embodied drone interface for aerial manipulation. With the immersive frame-work constructed by Unity and Virtual and Augment Reality (VR/AR), the system allows the operator to leverage their intelligence to evaluate the tasks and collaboratively perform the desired tasks beyond the operator’s line-of-sight with a mobile manipulating drone. Flight trials demonstrate the results from three horizontal tasks including drilling, peg-in-hole, and key manipulation to illustrate the efficacy of this system. This paper concludes that the successful human-embodied drone interface can contribute to society by the following: a quality dataset for autonomous dexterous aerial manipulation; hardware-free training system; opportunities for various people who live outside of normal life boundaries.