Natural Interaction Techniques for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System

Abstract

This article provides an overview of existing interaction techniques for controlling unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. This work focuses on user interfaces with nontraditional input modalities, such as gestures, speech, and gaze direction. Although the authors analyze interaction with UAV systems, most of the findings can be applied to human-robot interaction in general. The authors report on interaction techniques employed to control single as well as multiple UAV systems, define intuitiveness of input vocabularies in the considered context, and introduce a new classification scheme based on the mental models underlying the interaction vocabulary. This article is part of a special issue on drones.