Development of an immersive teleoperating system for unmanned helicopter

To collect the information on devastated districts, it is effective to use helicopters. However, the operation using manned helicopters costs a lot. It is expected that the use of unmanned helicopters can reduce the cost of these tasks. It is known to be more difficult to operate unmanned helicopters remotely than to operate manned helicopters. The reason is that an operator cannot know the attitude of the helicopter when the operator is far apart from it, and the coordination system between them varies drastically depending on the attitude of the helicopter. In this paper, we propose an immersive teleoperating method of unmanned helicopters which allows an operator to control unmanned helicopters easily and intuitively as if the operator is on board. In this method, an operator controls a helicopter remotely while watching the surrounding views of the helicopter through a head mounted display(HMD). To verify the feasibility of the proposed method, we first developed a flight simulator and conducted comparative experiments. Then we developed an immersive teleoperating system of unmanned helicopters which consists of an omnidirectional vision sensor and a HMD with an angle sensor. The experimental results indicate our proposed method has an advantage over the conventional operating method.