High-Level Teleoperation System for Aerial Exploration of Indoor Environments

Werner Alexander Isop; Christoph Gebhardt; Tobias Nägeli; Friedrich Fraundorfer; Otmar Hilliges; Dieter Schmalstieg

doi:10.3389/frobt.2019.00095

High-Level Teleoperation System for Aerial Exploration of Indoor Environments

Front Robot AI. 2019 Oct 23:6:95. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2019.00095. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Werner Alexander Isop¹, Christoph Gebhardt², Tobias Nägeli², Friedrich Fraundorfer¹, Otmar Hilliges², Dieter Schmalstieg^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria.
² Advanced Interactive Technologies Lab, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland.
³ VRVis Research Center, Vienna, Austria.

Abstract

Exploration of challenging indoor environments is a demanding task. While automation with aerial robots seems a promising solution, fully autonomous systems still struggle with high-level cognitive tasks and intuitive decision making. To facilitate automation, we introduce a novel teleoperation system with an aerial telerobot that is capable of handling all demanding low-level tasks. Motivated by the typical structure of indoor environments, the system creates an interactive scene topology in real-time that reduces scene details and supports affordances. Thus, difficult high-level tasks can be effectively supervised by a human operator. To elaborate on the effectiveness of our system during a real-world exploration mission, we conducted a user study. Despite being limited by real-world constraints, results indicate that our system better supports operators with indoor exploration, compared to a baseline system with traditional joystick control.

Keywords: indoor exploration tasks; interactive scene topology; scene abstraction; search and rescue; teleoperation systems; telerobotics; unmanned aerial vehicles - UAV.