Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System

Abstract

With recent regulatory efforts to reduce restrictions placed on the operation of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in the United States, it is likely that in the next few years, these vehicles will become commonplace in the commercial marketplace as they are in military environments. In order to reduce the barrier to entry for operations of MAVs, customers of these systems will require ease of operation as well as minimal training time in order to reduce costs. To this end, a smartphone application was developed to control a quadrotor remotely in the exploration of an unknown environment, and tested for users with only three minutes of training. Initial motion capture room tests produced encouraging results for localization and target identification tasks, however, such environments are inherently artificial and the extensibility of such results is limited. A follow-on outdoor field study was conducted in order to compare the indoor and outdoor results and to assess operator performance in a realistic environment. Performance on the outdoor localization tasks was comparable to the indoor study, however, participants generally performed slightly worse on the target identification task in the outdoor experiment, attributed to camera image quality and GPS localization issues. Other issues such as wind and flight safety considerations are discussed.