First-Person View Interfaces for Teleoperation of Aerial Swarms

Aerial swarms can substantially improve the effectiveness of drones in applications such as inspection, monitoring, and search for rescue. This is especially true when those swarms are made of several individual drones that use local sensing and coordination rules to achieve collective motion. Despite recent progress in swarm autonomy, human control and decision-making are still critical for missions where lives are at risk or human cognitive skills are required. However, first-person-view (FPV) teleoperation systems require one or more human operators per drone, limiting the scalability of these systems to swarms. This work investigates the performance, preference, and behaviour of pilots using different FPV interfaces for teleoperation of aerial swarms. Interfaces with single and multiple perspectives were experimentally studied with humans piloting a simulated aerial swarm through an obstacle course. Participants were found to prefer and perform better with views from the back of the swarm, while views from the front caused users to fly faster but resulted in more crashes. Presenting users with multiple views at once resulted in a slower completion time, and users were found to focus on the largest view, regardless of its perspective within the swarm.