OAST: Obstacle Avoidance System for Teleoperation of UAVs

This article presents a novel flight assistance system, obstacle avoidance system for teleoperation (OAST), whose main role is to make teleoperation of small multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) safer and more efficient in closed spaces. The OAST allows the operator to avoid obstacles while keeping a liberty of movement. The UAV is controlled through a 3-D haptic controller and the OAST amends the user input to increase safety and efficiency of the teleoperation. The design of the OAST is verified in computerized experiments. Moreover, a simulation involving 20 participants is carried out to validate the proposed scheme. This experiment shows that the OAST improves the completion time of the scenarios by 41% on average while reducing the workload of the operator from 57 to 27 points on the NASA Task Load Index test. The number of collisions with the environment is all but eliminated in these scenarios.