Experimental investigation of teleoperation performance for miniature rotorcraft

This paper identifies a baseline level of performance that will be used for assessing teleoperation systems for miniature rotorcraft. The experimental results show the performance measured while operating a miniature rotorcraft in a typical RC mode (the pilot directly observes the helicopter) as well as a simple teleoperation mode (the pilot operates the vehicle using video from an onboard camera). The importance of this work is to create a performance benchmark that can be used as a reference point when testing more advanced teleoperation systems. The paper will give a brief overview of the experimental architecture, define the performance metrics being used, and describe the flight tasks being investigated. The performance metrics calculated from experimental data will then be presented along with some conclusions about the findings. This paper is the beginning of a process to systematically investigate different visual cues and control augmentations that can simplify the teleoperation task for an operator. The goal of this research is to gain a detailed understanding of how the human pilot´s performance during teleoperation is affected by the system configuration and to identify the bounds on the performance.