FlyJacket: An Upper Body Soft Exoskeleton for Immersive Drone Control

Most human–drone interfaces, such as joysticks and remote controllers, require attention and developed skills during teleoperation. Wearable interfaces could enable a more natural and intuitive control of drones, which would make this technology accessible to a larger population of users. In this letter, we describe a soft exoskeleton, so called FlyJacket, designed for naïve users that want to control a drone with upper body gestures in an intuitive manner. The exoskeleton includes a motion-tracking device to monitor body movements, an arm support system to prevent fatigue, and is coupled to goggles for first-person-view from the drone perspective. Tests were performed with participants flying a simulated fixed-wing drone moving at a constant speed; participants’ performance was more consistent when using the FlyJacket with the arm support than when performing the same task with a remote controller. Furthermore, participants felt more immersed, had more sensation of flying, and reported less fatigue when the arm support was enabled. The FlyJacket has been demonstrated for the teleoperation of a real drone.

[1]  Federico Manuri,et al.  A Kinect-based natural interface for quadrotor control , 2011, Entertain. Comput..

[2]  Sheng Quan Xie,et al.  Exoskeleton robots for upper-limb rehabilitation: state of the art and future prospects. , 2012, Medical engineering & physics.

[3]  Brian L. Day,et al.  Vestibular Reafference Shapes Voluntary Movement , 2005, Current Biology.

[4]  Christina T Fuentes,et al.  Where is your arm? Variations in proprioception across space and tasks. , 2010, Journal of neurophysiology.

[5]  Kyu-Jin Cho,et al.  Development and evaluation of a soft wearable weight support device for reducing muscle fatigue on shoulder , 2017, PloS one.

[6]  Sebastian Madgwick,et al.  Estimation of IMU and MARG orientation using a gradient descent algorithm , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics.

[7]  Allison M. Okamura,et al.  Exomuscle: An inflatable device for shoulder abduction support , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[8]  D. Floreano,et al.  Embodied Flight with a Drone , 2017, 2019 Third IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC).

[9]  Ehud Sharlin,et al.  Collocated interaction with flying robots , 2011, 2011 RO-MAN.

[10]  Just L Herder,et al.  Principle and design of a mobile arm support for people with muscular weakness. , 2006, Journal of rehabilitation research and development.

[11]  Michael A. Goodrich,et al.  Human-Robot Interaction: A Survey , 2008, Found. Trends Hum. Comput. Interact..

[12]  Jose L Pons,et al.  Wearable Robots: Biomechatronic Exoskeletons , 2008 .

[13]  Chen-Hua Yeow,et al.  Development of a soft robotic shoulder assistive device for shoulder abduction , 2016, 2016 6th IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob).

[14]  Joseph J. LaViola,et al.  Exploring 3d gesture metaphors for interaction with unmanned aerial vehicles , 2013, IUI '13.

[15]  Jiping He,et al.  Design and Control of RUPERT: A Device for Robotic Upper Extremity Repetitive Therapy , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

[16]  Leonardo Cappello,et al.  A soft wearable robot for the shoulder: Design, characterization, and preliminary testing , 2017, 2017 International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR).

[17]  Adrian Stoica,et al.  Remote Control of Quadrotor Teams, Using Hand Gestures , 2014, 2014 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[18]  Joseph J. LaViola,et al.  A discussion of cybersickness in virtual environments , 2000, SGCH.

[19]  Craig R. Carignan,et al.  Development of an exoskeleton haptic interface for virtual task training , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[20]  Robin R. Murphy,et al.  Human-robot interactions during the robot-assisted urban search and rescue response at the World Trade Center , 2003, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B.

[21]  Robert J. Wood,et al.  Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones , 2015, Nature.

[22]  Paolo Fiorini,et al.  Search and Rescue Robotics , 2008, Springer Handbook of Robotics.

[23]  Jessie Y. C. Chen,et al.  Supervisory Control of Multiple Robots: Human-Performance Issues and User-Interface Design , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews).

[24]  Dario Floreano,et al.  A Collision‐resilient Flying Robot , 2014, J. Field Robotics.

[25]  Dario Floreano,et al.  Dynamic Routing for Flying Ad Hoc Networks , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

[26]  Robin R. Murphy,et al.  On the Human–Machine Interaction of Unmanned Aerial System Mission Specialists , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems.

[27]  Kyu-Jin Cho,et al.  Development of A Meal Assistive Exoskeleton made of Soft Materials for polymyositis patients , 2014, 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[28]  Sunil Kumar Agrawal,et al.  A cable driven upper arm exoskeleton for upper extremity rehabilitation , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[29]  Robert Riener,et al.  ARMin: a robot for patient-cooperative arm therapy , 2007, Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing.

[30]  Frans C. T. van der Helm,et al.  Influence of attachment pressure and kinematic configuration on pHRI with wearable robots , 2009 .