Exocentric Control Scheme for Robot Applications: An Immersive Virtual Reality Approach

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exhibit great agility but usually require an experienced pilot to operate them in certain applications such as inspection for disaster scenarios or buildings. The reduction of cognitive overload when driving this kind of aerial robot becomes a challenge and several solutions can be found in the literature. A new virtual control scheme for reducing this cognitive overload when controlling an aerial robot is proposed in this paper. The architecture is based on a novel interaction Drone Exocentric Advanced Metaphor (DrEAM) located in a Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) and a real robot containing an embedded controller based on quaternion formulation. The testing room, where real robots are evolving, is located away from the CAVE and they are connected via UDP in a ground station. The user controls manually a virtual drone through the DrEAM interaction metaphor, and the real robot imitates autonomously in real time the trajectory imposed by the user in the virtual environment. Experimental results illustrate the easy implementation and feasibility of the proposed scheme in two different scenarios. Results from these tests show that the mental effort when controlling a drone using the proposed virtual control scheme is lower than when controlling it in direct view. Moreover, the easy maneuverability and controllability of the real drone is also demonstrated in real time experiments.