Guidecopter -a precise drone-based haptic guidance interface for blind or visually impaired people

Abstract

Drone assisted navigation aids for supporting walking activities of visually impaired have been established in related work but fne-point object grasping tasks and the object localization in unknown environments still presents an open and complex challenge. We present a drone-based interface that provides fne-grain haptic feedback and thus physically guides them in hand-object localization tasks in unknown surroundings. Our research is built around community groups of blind or visually impaired (BVI) people, which provide in-depth insights during the development process and serve later as study participants. A pilot study infers users' sensibility to applied guiding stimuli forces and the diferent human-drone tether interfacing possibilities. In a comparative follow-up study, we show that our drone-based approach achieves greater accuracy compared to a current audio-based hand guiding system and delivers overall a more intuitive and relatable fne-point guiding experience.