Investigation of gesture based UAV control

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the functionality and effectiveness of hand gestures to control flight operations and onboard equipment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This study utilizes the Leap Motion Controller (LMC) to sense hand motions. The LMC is a gesture based, human-computer interface (HCI) device. For this application, a primitive gesture library was developed by considering fundamental UAV operations. The LMC application programming interface was then used to implement an interpreter to identify the motions and translate them into UAV performance and control commands. Careful attention was paid to identifying and developing natural, intuitive, and common hand gestures that can be sensed in the LMC field of view. It is anticipated that this work will provide the framework from which to develop a gesture based library for actual UAV control and other LMC applications.