Effect of haptic feedback in a trajectory following task with an unmanned aerial vehicle

Due to the limited field of view of a camera, visual information may not be sufficient to control an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In particular when the camera is not pointing into the direction of motion, perception of environment constraints can be considerably difficult. The use of haptic feedback would provide tactile cues complementing the information from the visual channel. This paper presents the results of an experimental evaluation of using haptic feedback for manual control of an UAV helicopter in a trajectory following task. The experiment involves controlling an UAV helicopter along a reference trajectory as fast and accurately as possible. The trajectory is represented by a three-dimensional tunnel-in-the-sky display of which the walls represent the environment constraints. The experiment only considers the horizontal plane. The results of the experiment indicate that haptic feedback can be used to support the operator in perceiving tunnel walls as environment constraints. The performance, control activity and workload strongly depend on the manner in which repulsive forces are fed back to the human operator.