A Distributed Architecture for Human-Drone Teaming: Timing Challenges and Interaction Opportunities
Department of Telecooperation, Johannes Kepler University, Altenberger Strasse 69, 4040 Linz, Austria
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Sensors 2019, 19(6), 1379; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19061379
Received: 15 October 2018 / Revised: 2 February 2019 / Accepted: 28 February 2019 / Published: 20 March 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems and Applications)
Drones are expected to operate autonomously, yet they will also interact with humans to solve tasks together. To support civilian human-drone teams, we propose a distributed architecture where sophisticated operations such as image recognition, coordination with humans, and flight-control decisions are made, not on-board the drone, but remotely. The benefits of such an architecture are the increased computational power available for image recognition and the possibility to integrate interfaces for humans. On the downside, communication is necessary, resulting in the delayed reception of commands. In this article, we discuss the design considerations of the distributed approach, a sample implementation on a smartphone, and an application to the concrete use case of bookshelf inventory. Further, we report experimentally-derived first insights into messaging and command response delays with a custom drone connected through Wi-Fi.
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Keywords:
drones; UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles); networked systems; network performance; human–robot interaction
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MDPI and ACS Style
Hummel, K.A.; Pollak, M.; Krahofer, J. A Distributed Architecture for Human-Drone Teaming: Timing Challenges and Interaction Opportunities. Sensors 2019, 19, 1379.
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