DroneCamo: Modifying Human-Drone Comfort via Augmented Reality

Abstract

We present an augmented reality (AR) system for drones to improve people's comfort by camouflaging the appearance of the drones via optical see-through AR visualization. Given the growing social use of autonomous robots such as self-driving vehicles and delivery drones, a comfortable coexistence of human and robot is becoming an increasingly important topic. In this work, we explore how AR technology could improve human-robot comfort. Specifically, we demonstrated an AR system and conducted a user study (N=14) on a proof-of-concept AR system consisting of a HoloLens, OptiTrack, and a toy drone. While showing AR avatars with seemingly positive or negative appearances, we collected both objective and subjective measures of the subjects' comfort. Our results show that subjects were more comfortable when the drone was camouflaged with a positive avatar and less comfortable for the negative avatar.