AUTHOR=Isop Werner Alexander , Gebhardt Christoph , Nägeli Tobias , Fraundorfer Friedrich , Hilliges Otmar , Schmalstieg Dieter TITLE=High-Level Teleoperation System for Aerial Exploration of Indoor Environments JOURNAL=Frontiers in Robotics and AI VOLUME=6 YEAR=2019 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/articles/10.3389/frobt.2019.00095 DOI=10.3389/frobt.2019.00095 ISSN=2296-9144 ABSTRACT=

Exploration of challenging indoor environments is a demanding task. While automation with aerial robots seems a promising solution, fully autonomous systems still struggle with high-level cognitive tasks and intuitive decision making. To facilitate automation, we introduce a novel teleoperation system with an aerial telerobot that is capable of handling all demanding low-level tasks. Motivated by the typical structure of indoor environments, the system creates an interactive scene topology in real-time that reduces scene details and supports affordances. Thus, difficult high-level tasks can be effectively supervised by a human operator. To elaborate on the effectiveness of our system during a real-world exploration mission, we conducted a user study. Despite being limited by real-world constraints, results indicate that our system better supports operators with indoor exploration, compared to a baseline system with traditional joystick control.