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Multimodal Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Controller

Regarding that quad-rotors are capable of moving in six degrees of freedom, meaning every possible movement in a 3D coordination, at least 12 buttons are required to control one of them ignoring intensity of movement pace in each direction. Even reducing degrees of freedom to four by considering only linear, lateral, altitude and rotational each with a signed movement speed will not help much since there are a lot of efforts should be put by a single human operator in order to control quad-rotor's navigation.
Besides of using traditional mouse and keyboard approach, nowadays some other tools such as gamepads and joysticks are being used in order to deliver human operator more abilities in controlling such vehicles. Although usage of game pads and joysticks is increasing, they are not perfect. Thus we decided to propose a new approach using multimodal interfaces. It means that some new devices are used to interact with the system in order to achieve more convenience in addition to more efficient navigation control of quad-rotor. Among all possible interaction methods, a combination of position, touch and gesture recognition is used for the purpose. Consequently some devices are selected to deliver these services and help reducing development time.
As a tool for pose tracking purpose, an Android device with position sensors -accelerometer and gyroscope- is used. In addition to pose tracking, android device is capable of delivering touch information to the fusion system where all information from each section is gathered to make a final decision. Besides, Microsoft Kinect is used as a handy device to recognize operator predefined gestures during run.

Progress video playlist : http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC4D638E40D745DED