Visual-Vestibular Feedback for Enhanced Situational Awareness in Teleoperation of UAVs

This paper presents a novel concept for improving the situational awareness of a ground operator in remote control of a Unmanned Arial Vehicle (UAV). To this end, we propose to integrate vestibular feedback with the usual visual feedback obtained from a UAV onboard camera. We use our motion platform, the CyberMotion simulator, so as to reproduce online the desired motion cues. We test this architecture by flying a small-scale quadcopter and run a detailed performance evaluation on 12 test subjects. We then discuss the results in terms of possible benefits for facilitating the remote control task.