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“Fly Like This”: Natural Language Interfaces for UAV Mission Planning

Authors:
Meghan Chandarana
Erica Meszaros
Anna Trujillo
Bonnie Danette Allen

Keywords: natural language, gesture, speech, flight path

Abstract:
With the increasing presence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in everyday environments, the user base of these powerful and potentially intelligent machines is expanding beyond exclusively highly trained vehicle operators to include non-expert system users. Scientists seeking to augment costly and often inflexible methods of data collection historically used are turning towards lower cost and reconfigurable UAVs. These new users require more intuitive and natural methods for UAV mission planning. This paper explores two natural language interfaces -- gesture and speech -- for UAV flight path generation through individual user studies. Subjects who participated in the user studies also used a mouse-based interface for a baseline comparison. Each interface allowed the user to build flight paths from a library of twelve individual trajectory segments. Individual user studies evaluated performance, efficacy, and ease-of-use of each interface using background surveys, subjective questionnaires, and observations on time and correctness. Analysis indicates that natural language interfaces are promising alternatives to traditional interfaces. The user study data collected on the efficacy and potential of each interface will be used to inform future intuitive UAV interface design for non-expert users.

Pages: 40 to 46

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: March 19, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4138

ISBN: 978-1-61208-538-8

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from March 19, 2017 to March 23, 2017