Date of Award

2021

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics

Department

Mechanical, Industrial and Systems Engineering

First Advisor

Chengzhi Yuan

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more and more integrated into our lives as they are able to fulfill new tasks and become more affordable. Human-UAV Interaction (HUI) therefore is an important topic researcher are working on. As a type of UAVs, quadcopters are characterized with uncertainties in their flying behavior and considered dangerous for humans because of their spinning propellers. Interaction through touch is therefore rarely used as interaction method. Hence, in this work Virtual Reality (VR) is used to simulate a quadcopter to create a platform for virtual HUI. In the development process, Unity was chosen to handle the Virtual Reality application and Gazebo running on the Robot Operating System was used to simulate the quadcopter. The user interface is provided by the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. Finally, two conducted experiments validated that the system is capable of computing and performing new trajectories of the UAV from physical user inputs. Moreover, the performance of the system was analyzed, and delays of dedicated system components were computed.

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