Perching-Based Haptic Guidance for Physical Human�Robot Interaction with Aerial Robots
Ayano Miyamichi, Kei Okada
AI summary
Problem
Existing human-drone interaction relies on continuous flight or non-contact cues, which limits interaction duration and prevents direct physical guidance. These methods also struggle with energy constraints and environmental dependencies like poor visibility.
Approach
The researchers designed a deformable aerial robot with inflatable actuators that safely perches on a human arm. It uses thrust modulation and vibration to deliver context-aware directional and alert cues without requiring sustained flight.
Key results
- Successful arm-perching and deperching on real platform
- Thrust-based directional cue generation with verified force characteristics
- Context-adaptive switching between pulse and vibration feedback modes
- User navigation success without vision/hearing with 33% lower power than flight
Why it matters
Enables energy-efficient, sustained close-contact guidance for aerial robots in low-visibility or high-noise environments, expanding their utility in rescue and accessibility applications.
Abstract
In recent years, the field of Human-Drone Inter- action (HDI) has attracted significant attention, particularly in navigation assistance using aerial robots. However, existing approaches rely on non-contact cues or indirect physical con- nections such as cables, which demand continuous flight and high energy consumption. These limitations shorten interaction time and make direct assistance challenging. To address this issue, we employ a deformable aerial robot with inflatable structures that enables adaptive perching on the human arm. On this platform, we propose a perching-based haptic guidance method in which the robot maintains close contact to deliver directional cues via thrust modulation and provide alerts and arrival feedback through vibration signals. The system further switches haptics modes dynamically according to context, en- abling intuitive and flexible guidance beyond conventional meth- ods limited to simple directional cues. Through experiments, we quantitatively evaluated the presented force characteristics and confirmed that perching-based haptic guidance requires less power than continuous flight in the same platform. User experiments further demonstrated that participants could reach target locations without major deviations even when vision and hearing were blocked. Moreover, the entire process of approach, perching, haptic guidance, and deperching was stably executed on the real platform, validating the feasibility of perching-based haptic guidance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to realize close physical Human-Drone Interaction (pHDI) through perching-based haptic guidance.