Oculus Rift Application for Training Drone Pilots

The research described in this paper, focuses on a virtual reality headset system that integrates the Oculus Rift VR headset with a low cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to allow for drone teleoperation and telepresence using the Robot Operating System (ROS). We developed a system that allows the pilot to fly an AR Drone through natural head movements translated to a set of flight commands. The system is designed to be easy to use for the purposes of training drone pilots. The user simply has to move their head and these movements are translated to the quadrotor which then turns in that direction. Altitude control is implemented using a Wii Nunchuck joystick for altitude adjustment. The users use the Oculus Rift headset a 2D video stream from the AR Drone, which is then turned into a 3D image stream and presented to them on the headset.

[1]  Keita Higuchi,et al.  Flying head: A head-synchronization mechanism for flying telepresence , 2013, 2013 23rd International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT).

[2]  Mark D. McKay,et al.  Telepresence for mobile robots in nuclear environments , 1996, Other Conferences.

[3]  David W. Hainsworth,et al.  Teleoperation User Interfaces for Mining Robotics , 2001, Auton. Robots.

[4]  Daniel Thalmann,et al.  Immersive flight for surveillance applications , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces.

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

[6]  Joseph J. LaViola,et al.  Exploring head tracked head mounted displays for first person robot teleoperation , 2014, IUI.

[7]  Vincent Dupourqué,et al.  A robot operating system , 1984, ICRA.

[8]  G. Klein,et al.  Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces , 2007, 2007 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

[9]  Ryad Chellali,et al.  Virtual and Augmented Reality with Head-Tracking for Efficient Teleoperation of Groups of Robots , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Cyberworlds.

[10]  Fredrik Rehnmark,et al.  Robonaut: A Robot Designed to Work with Humans in Space , 2003, Auton. Robots.

[11]  Matei T. Ciocarlie,et al.  Interactive Markers: 3-D User Interfaces for ROS Applications [ROS Topics] , 2011, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[12]  Tomohiro Tanikawa,et al.  Towards Mobile Embodied 3D Avatar as Telepresence Vehicle , 2013, HCI.

[13]  Rodrigo Ventura,et al.  Immersive 3-D teleoperation of a search and rescue robot using a head-mounted display , 2009, 2009 IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation.