Human-guided motion planner with perception awareness for assistive aerial teleoperation

Abstract

Assistive aerial teleoperation in unknown environments can be challenging due to the limited sensing range of cameras and the insufficient human–computer interaction. Obstacles occluding the field of view (FOV ) of camera reduce the visibility of unknown environments, and it coupled with insufficient pilot instructions directly affect human intention recognition. To address this issue, the planned trajectory generated by assistive teleoperation should align with human intention while considering perception awareness (PA) of the FOV. However, most of the existing works considering PA solely increase the FOV visibility while neglect the human intention constraints. As a result, the PA constraints can cause the heading of the quadrotor to deviate from human expectation, requiring more human–computer interactions to correct it. In this paper, we propose a human-guided motion planner with perception awareness to solve these issues. Specifically, in the path-finding stage, we introduce a spatio-temporal path similarity metric method. This method, combined with motion primitive propagation, finds an initial path that is collision-free and roughly aligned with human intention. In the subsequent trajectory optimization stage, we jointly consider PA with respect to occlusion and human intention constraints, effectively optimizing FOV visibility without deviating the heading of quadrotor from human intention. Extensive experiments and benchmark comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in solving assistive aerial teleoperation for even novice operators.