One-Hand Controller for Human-Drone Interaction – a Human-Centered Prototype Development

Abstract

Using remote control transmitters is a common way to control a drone. For the future, we envision drones that are intuitively controllable with new input devices. One possibility could be the use of one-hand controllers. Here, we present an exploration of using a 3-D mouse as a controller for human-drone interaction. We ran a pre-study that investigated the users’ natural spatial mapping between controller and drone dimensions. Based on these results we developed our prototype that shows the feasibility of our concept. A series of flight tests were conducted and the mapping between controller and flight movements were iteratively improved. In this paper, we present our development process and the implementation of our prototype.