GuideCopter - A Precise Drone-Based Haptic Guidance Interface for Blind or Visually Impaired People
Felix Huppert, Gerold Hoelzl, Matthias Kranz
Abstract
Drone assisted navigation aids for supporting walking activities of visually impaired have been established in related work but fine-point object grasping tasks and the object localization in unknown environments still presents an open and complex challenge. We present a drone-based interface that provides fine-grain haptic feedback and thus physically guides them in hand-object localization tasks in unknown surroundings. Our research is built around community groups of blind or visually impaired (BVI) people, which provide in-depth insights during the development process and serve later as study participants. A pilot study infers users’ sensibility to applied guiding stimuli forces and the different human-drone tether interfacing possibilities. In a comparative follow-up study, we show that our drone-based approach achieves greater accuracy compared to a current audio-based hand guiding system and delivers overall a more intuitive and relatable fine-point guiding experience.