Bilateral haptic teleoperation of VTOL UAVs

This paper presents an intuitive teleoperation scheme to safely operate a wide range of VTOL UAVs by an untrained user in a cluttered environment. This scheme includes a novel force-feedback algorithm that enables the user to feel the texture of the environment. In addition, a novel mapping function is introduced to teleoperate the UAV in an unlimited workspace in position control mode with a joystick which has a limited workspace. An obstacle avoidance strategy is designed to autonomously modify the position set point of the UAV independently of the pilot´s commands. The stability analysis of the whole teleoperation loop is provided. Experiments demonstrate the successful teleoperation of a UAV using an haptic joystick and a hexacopter UAV equipped with a 2D laser-range scanner.