Bilateral human-robot control for semi-autonomous UAV navigation

Abstract

This paper proposes a semi-autonomous bilateral control architecture for unmanned aerial vehicles. During autonomous navigation, a human operator is allowed to assist the autonomous controller of the vehicle by actively changing its navigation parameters to assist it in critical situations, such as navigating through narrow paths. The overall goal of the controller is to combine the stability and precision of an autonomous control with the cognitive abilities of a human operator, only when strictly required for the accomplishment of a task. The control architecture has been validated through simulations and experiments.