Design and Evaluation of an AR Voice-based Indoor UAV Assistant for Smart Home Scenarios

As technology advances, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as an innovative solution to a variety of problems in many fields. Automated control of UAVs is most common in large area operations, but they may also increase the versatility of smart home compositions by acting as a physical helper. For example, a voice-controlled UAV could act as an intelligent aerial assistant that can be seamlessly integrated into smart home systems. In this paper, we present a novel Augmented Reality (AR)-based UAV control that provides high-level control over a UAV by automating common UAV missions. In our work, we enable users to operate a small UAV hands-free using only a small set of voice commands. To help users identify the targets, and to understand the UAV's intentions, targets within the user's field of vision are highlighted in an AR interface. We evaluate our approach in a user study (n=26) regarding usability, physical and mental demand, as well as a focus on the users' preferences. Our study showed that the use of the proposed control was not only accepted, but some users stated that they would use such a system at home to help with some tasks at home.