Implementation of a User-Friendly Drone Control Interface Using Hand Gestures and Vibrotactile Feedback

With the increasing use of drones, drone-related accidents have also increased. The main cause of these accidents is associated with the operational issue due to the difficulty of manipulation, especially for a novice. In this paper, a user-friendly drone control interface with hand gesture recognition and vibrotactile feedback is proposed to present additional information on obstacles distributed in the flight environment. Sensitivity analysis was performed to determine the key parameters of hand gestures and with these results, deep learning-based gesture recognition was developed. To effectively avoid obstacles around a drone, the vibration intensity was adjusted according to the distance between the drone and its obstacles. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, drone flight simulation and a preliminary experiment were conducted. Results indicate that the proposed interface is useful for controlling drone more intuitively and safely.