Aerospace

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Directing Quadroter Teams Using Face Engagement and Voice Commands

Building on previous work in real-time vision-based human robot interaction, researchers at Simon Fraser University's Autonomy Lab have demonstrated the ability to command teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by an uninstrumented human. The research team has completed a series of trials with two and three low-cost UAVs and off-board processing to demonstrate the practicality of their approach. To create a team, the user focuses attention on an individual robot simply by looking at it, then adds or removes it from the current team with a motion-based hand gesture. Another gesture commands the entire team to begin task execution. Robots communicate among themselves by wireless network to ensure that no more than one robot is focused.