Adaptive View Management for Drone Teleoperation in Complex 3D Structures

Abstract

Drone navigation in complex environments poses many problems to teleoperators. Especially in 3D structures like buildings or tunnels, viewpoints are often limited to the drone's current camera view, nearby objects can be collision hazards, and frequent occlusion can hinder accurate manipulation. To address these issues, we have developed a novel interface for teleoperation that provides a user with environment-adaptive viewpoints that are automatically configured to improve safety and smooth user operation. This real-time adaptive viewpoint system takes robot position, orientation, and 3D pointcloud information into account to modify user-viewpoint to maximize visibility. Our prototype uses simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) based reconstruction with an omnidirectional camera and we use resulting models as well as simulations in a series of preliminary experiments testing navigation of various structures. Results suggest that automatic viewpoint generation can outperform first and third-person view interfaces for virtual teleoperators in terms of ease of control and accuracy of robot operation.