swarmcloak: landing of a swarm of nano-quadrotors on human
TRANSCRIPT
SwarmCloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors onHuman Arms
Evgeny [email protected]
Skoltech, Moscow
Ruslan [email protected]
Skoltech, Moscow
Roman [email protected]
Skoltech, Moscow
Luiza [email protected]
Skoltech, Moscow
Taha [email protected]
UEC, Tokyo
Hiroyuki [email protected]
UEC, Tokyo
Dzmitry [email protected]
Skoltech, Moscow
Figure 1: (a) Human operator lands four drones using landing pads, (b) hand-based landing pad, (c) sensor-vibrator unit.
ABSTRACTWe propose a novel system SwarmCloak for landing of a fleet of fourflying robots on the human arms using light-sensitive landing padswith vibrotactile feedback. We developed two types of wearabletactile displays with vibromotors which are activated by the lightemitted from the LED array at the bottom of quadcopters. In a userstudy, participants were asked to adjust the position of the armsto land up to two drones, having only visual feedback, only tactilefeedback or visual-tactile feedback. The experiment revealed thatwhen the number of drones increases, tactile feedback plays a moreimportant role in accurate landing and operator’s convenience. Animportant finding is that the best landing performance is achievedwith the combination of tactile and visual feedback. The proposedtechnology could have a strong impact on the human-swarm inter-action, providing a new level of intuitiveness and engagement intothe swarm deployment just right from the skin surface.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-computer interaction→ Interaction devices.
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KEYWORDShuman-swarm interaction, tactile interaction with drones, quad-copter landing, multi-agent systems
ACM Reference Format:Evgeny Tsykunov, Ruslan Agishev, Roman Ibrahimov, Luiza Labazanova,TahaMoriyama, Hiroyuki Kajimoto, and Dzmitry Tsetserukou. 2019. Swarm-Cloak: Landing of a Swarm of Nano-Quadrotors on Human Arms. In Pro-ceedings of ACM Conference (Conference’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA,2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn
1 INTRODUCTIONThe swarm of drones is the subject of intensive interest of e-commercecompanies and the scientific community. Fleets can contain thou-sands of robots and can be operated in both well prepared indoorand an occasional outdoor environment [Berg et al. 2016].
For the human operator, it is often easier and faster to catch asmall size quadrotor right in the midair instead of landing it on asurface in autonomous mode. There might be several reasons for it.For the outdoor applications, the landing surface is usually unevenand has a lot of dust, which could lead to a crash of the robots. Evenwhen the landing spots (helipads) are well prepared, autonomouslanding is not always the best solution due to position estimationerrors, low robustness or high cost of a positioning system.
On the other side, the human body is widely used to controlrobot formation with gestures or hand motions [Labazanova et al.2019; Tsykunov et al. 2019]. Along with that, [Scheggi et al. 2014]demonstrated that tactile feedback could be effectively appliedfor the control and interaction with the swarm of robots. However,interaction strategies for formation takeoff/landing operations have
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not yet been considered, especially when the swarm of drones islanding on the human body.
To achieve interactivity during the swarm deployment, we de-veloped the tactile interface that is used to deliver the informationabout the position of the drones relevant to the landing pads whichare located on the human arms (see Figure 1). The location of thetactile stimulus reveals the position of the drone in the horizontalplane and stimulus intensity shows the distance to the robot ina vertical direction. Small drones are moving very fast, which re-quires high-speed communication channels. To reduce the latency,we propose to use the light emitted from the bottom of the droneto drive vibromotors.
2 PRINCIPLE AND TECHNOLOGIESThe single sensor-tactor unit (STU), shown in Figure 1(c), is basedon HALUX technology [Uematsu et al. 2016] and it comprises alinear resonant actuator (LRA) (LD14- 002 by Nidec Copal Corpo-ration), a phototransistor (PT19-21C by Everlight Electronics CO.,Ltd.), and an oscillation circuit for LRA. LRAwas selected for its fastresponse (less than 20ms). The resonance frequency of the oscilla-tion circuit with LRA is 150Hz. Therefore, the vibration frequencyis set to 150Hz. The amplitude of vibrations is modulated by thephototransistor.
The prototypes of two types of devices (for hand and forearm) areshown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. The electronic circuit of each sensor-tactor unit is placed in the plastic cover which has a hole abovephoto-transistor for the light penetration (see Figure 1(b)). Theplastic cover is used to protect sensor from surrounding undesirablelight sources. The phototransistors are pointed upwards to detectthe light emitted from the array of LEDs at the bottom of drone.
For the hand-based device shown in Figure 1(b), we placed allsensor-vibromotor units directly on the palm and finger pads. Forthe forearm-worn device (Figure 2), we fixedly attached all sensorsto the ventral side of landing pads to robustly react on the lightsource, while the LRAs are placed directly on the forearm skinto generate strong tactile stimuli. The tactile pads are attached tohuman hand by Velcro tape.
The overall system consists of four landing pads and four Crazyflie2.0 drones with integrated LEDs. In addition to the safety glasses,small size (9 cm2) and weight (27 grams) of the quadrotor providesafety, which is required for applications that involve interactionwith human. To track the quadrotors, we set up a Vicon motion cap-ture system with 4 infrared cameras. We used the Robot OperatingSystem (ROS) Kinetic framework to run the custom software.
During the experimental studies, SwarmCloak demonstrated sev-eral significant advantages over pure visual feedback. It was shownthat the tactile feedback allows increasing accuracy of the landingpad positioning. It was also demonstrated that during the landingof two drones, tactile-visual feedback helped to considerably re-duce the motion dynamics of the human head. Two-way ANOVAof drone positions showed a statistically significant difference fordifferent feedback conditions. The number of drones does not sig-nificantly affect the performance of tactile feedback, in contrast tovisual feedback. The best landing positions were achieved with thecombination of visual and tactile feedback.
Figure 2: Landing of three drones on an arm.
3 APPLICATIONS AND FUTUREWORKWe proposed a novel system, in which the swarm is deployed inoutdoor or indoor environments without a need for expensive andcomplex motion capture system.
During the demonstrations, the users will wear two interactivelanding pads with protective safety glasses and experience thelanding of the fleet of drones on arms with tactile feedback.
Apart from the standalone landing of quadrotors, the technologymight be used in various applications. The proposed device cansignificantly augment the perception of flying objects in VirtualReality (VR) applications. Tactile sensations, such as bird landingor taking off from the human hands, can be simulated with Swarm-Cloak. Moreover, interaction with real or fictitious bioluminescencecreatures, such as jellyfish or wood sprites of Tree of Souls fromAvatar movie, can be implemented.
A unique telecommunication system can be developed based onSwarmCloak technology. The partners can communicate throughthe distance by their avatars represented in VR and augmented bythe swarm of drones. In this case, the swarm, which is capable oftactile interaction with a user in VR, might represent the skeletonstructure of the human body flying in the air. This may bring a newlevel of immersion of VR communication and teleconferencing.
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