Above your hand

Abstract

Above Your Hand is a new application of interactive aerial robot. We explore direct and natural interaction with autonomous aerial robots and its applications. The uniqueness of our approach is to use no external equipment such as controllers, motion tracking system or wireless control system.Our original palm-sized quadcopter (Figure 1, right) flies above your hand wearing a glove of a particular color. It is capable of following your hand using two onboard cameras (Figure 1, middle). One camera is attached horizontally to the quadcopter and the other vertically. When it does not detect hands, it keeps hovering at its current location by processing the feature points of the obtained images of its environment without particular landmarks [Konomura et al. 2013, 2014]. Since all of this processing is executed inside the onboard Linux-based microcontroller, it requires no external computational control at all. This is the world-first success in both the smallness and full autonomy within the onboard computer. The smallness enables more active and closer interaction in indoor environments. Conversely our robot does not perform well in outdoor or windy environments yet.Owing to the simple design of the interaction, it is easy for multiple people to be involved in the interaction at the same time. For example you can pass the flying robot to another person from hand to hand (Figure 1, left).There have been previous works on natural interaction with aerial robots. Ng made methods to interact with Parrot's AR.Drone using Microsoft's Kinect [Ng et al. 2011]. Sanna presented a NUI framework for quadcopter control [Sanna et al. 2013]. Lementec used multiple orientation sensors to classify gestures [Lementec et al. 2004]. Since all of these methods require stationary equipment, there are naturally limitations in the available area of the aerial robots. Our approach has much potential to remove this limitation.