Gestural Control

Many UAV’s rely on an operator to control the craft by hand. Several control schemes have been implemented across a number of UAV’s, ranging from point and click interfaces to joysticks. (See examples below). Some have mapped gestural controls to the UAV, as seen below with the handheld plane metaphor. But how do gestural controls affect performance? Will a direct mapping of gesture to the required action on-screen provide significant benefits to operator performance? Moreover, does altering the manner in which an operator manipulates a set of controls change an operator’s awareness of the aircraft’s position?

Examples of Two UAV Control Schemes

Examples of two different control schemes proposed by Raytheon (found here). What are the performance implications for changing an operator’s control from joystick and button presses to direct gestural control?

In the past, answering these questions may have required use of a UAV simulator, along with controls engineered specifically for experimental use. With the release of commercially available gesture-based controls (such as the Nintendo Wii), researchers may be able to explore some of these issues using commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) aviation simulations.

To show how this might be used, we are comparing novice flight performance using several control styles with the Game “Blazing Angels“. This game was chosen for several reasons. First, the third person perspective of the game mirrors some of the proposed interfaces for control (see images below). Second, the three controls styles used imitate proposed UAV control styles.

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Note the similarities in visual presentation between (left to right) the prototype UAV flight display (Quigley, Goodrich, & Beard, 2004) and the video game (Blazing Angels).

The current evaluation of variations in gestural control styles will serve two purposes:

  1. As a proof-of-concept test of the facility of gesture-based games as an evaluation platform for various control schemes.
  2. As an evaluation of the differences in Situational Awareness for controlling the aircraft as a function of control scheme used.