INVESTIGATION OF USER INTERFACE OF GYRO-SENSOR-BASED HAND GESTURAL DRONE CONTROLLER

Joystick controllers are used mainly for modern civil drones. However, joystick controllers are non-intuitive and require two hands to be used simultaneously. Therefore, although single-handed drone controllers using a joystick and hand gestures have been introduced, they have only replaced the right stick of the joystick controller with gyro sensors. While this approach retains interface continuity with conventional joystick controllers, it is not user-centric. Therefore we propose a gestural drone controller based on hand gestures, and compare it experimentally with conventional controllers, including an investigation of the effective differences depending on the user’s joystick experience. We separateparticipants into expert and novice joystick groups to investigate the joystick controller experience effects (e.g., radio-controlled cars, game consoles) for each controller type. The conventional joystick controller is found to be superior to the conventional gestural controller for five out of nine criteria, and superior to the proposed gestural controller for three out of nine criteria. The proposed gestural controller is more natural than the conventional gestural controller. There tends to be an interaction effect of the joystick experience and controller types, considering the naturalness of the controller.