A New Exocentric Metaphor for Complex Path Following to Control a UAV Using Mixed Reality

Teleoperation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has recently become an noteworthly research topic in the field of human robot interaction. Each year, a variety of devices is being studied to design adapted interface for diverse purpose such as view taking, search and rescue operation or suveillance. New interfaces have to be precise, simple and intuitive even for complex path planning. Moreover, when teleoperation involves long distance control, user needs to get proper feedbacks and avoid motion sickness. In order to overcome all these challenges, a new interaction metaphor named DrEAM (Drone Exocentric Advanced Metaphor) was designed. User can see the UAV he is controlling in a virtual environment mapped to the real world. He can interact with it as a simple object in a classical virtual world. An experiment was lead in order to evaluate the perfomances of this metaphor, comparing performance of novice user using either a direct-view joystick control or using DrEAM.