Wearable Human–Drone Interface: Gesture-Based Control and Vibrotactile Spatial Awareness

Manual multirotor piloting requires continuous visual monitoring and dual-stick manipulation, increasing cognitive workload and limiting usability for novice users and attention-constrained scenarios. This paper presents a bidirectional wearable human–drone interface that integrates an inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based gesture controller with an abdominal vibrotactile device to enable non-visual egocentric 3D relative-position awareness. The proposed GRU–ECOC gesture pipeline achieves 97.58% accuracy (macro F1 = 0.9773). A user-in-the-loop waypoint-following study with 12 novice users shows learnability, reducing completion time from 263 s to 186 s over five trials. For spatial feedback, we implement a 3-by-12 vibrotactile device that conveys egocentric 3D position and achieves 82.75% complete 3D recognition accuracy in an indoor study with 12 participants and 1,200 trials. At the integrated level, a real-drone point-to-point task compares Visual-only and Tactile-only operation under the same gesture-control condition. Tactile-only operation remains feasible but slower than the Visual-only baseline, with 8/9 successes and a mean completion time of 45.1 s compared with 9/9 successes and 31.4 s for Visual-only operation. A separate sensory-blocked forward-position-holding task further demonstrates the feasibility of non-visual closed-loop recovery, with successful recovery in all 8 boundary-exit events. These results support the feasibility of bidirectional wearable human–drone interaction while clarifying the cost of tactile-only state feedback relative to visual operation.