Environmental monitoring via UAVs offers unprecedented aerial observation capabilities. However, the limited flight durations of typical multirotors and the demands on human attention in outdoor missions call for more autonomous solutions. Addressing the specific challenges of precise UAV landings – especially amidst wind disturbances, obstacles, and unreliable global localization – we introduce a mobile hub concept. This hub facilitates continuous mission cycling for unmodified off-the-shelf UAVs. Our approach centers on a small landing platform affixed to a robotic arm, adeptly correcting UAV pose errors in windy conditions. Compact enough for installation in an economy car, the system emphasizes two novel strategies. Firstly, external visual tracking of the UAV informs the landing controls for both the drone and the robotic arm. The arm compensates for UAV positioning errors and aligns the platform’s attitude with the UAV for stable landings, even on small platforms under windy conditions. Secondly, the robotic arm can transport the UAV inside the hub, perform maintenance tasks like battery replacements, and then facilitate direct relaunches. Importantly, our design places all operational responsibility on the hub, ensuring the UAV remains unaltered. This ensures broad compatibility with standard UAVs, only necessitating an API for attitude setpoints. Experimental results underscore the efficiency of our model, achieving safe landings with minimal errors (≤ 7 cm) in winds up to 5 Beaufort (8.1 m/s). In essence, our mobile hub concept significantly boosts UAV mission availability, allowing for autonomous operations even under challenging conditions.

We present an accessible robot interface for telemanipulation (A-RIFT), which preserves the haptic channel partially in a zero-additional-cost interface by visual substitution of force feedback (VSFF). This work explores a gap in the literature, resulting from the focus on performance improvements in telerobotics at increasing interface costs. Unlike most telemanipulation interfaces for high-degree-of-freedom robotic systems, this one requires minimal training and can be run in a web browser under high latency conditions, using an Internet connected computer with the user's own mouse and keyboard. To evaluate the performance of the system, we ran a controlled user study (N=12) to test how different distances (local vs. remote) and VSFF (on vs. off) affect the system's usability. As expected, participants in remote conditions performed worse than those in closer proximity. Despite several participants claiming that the visual display of force feedback did not help them, our analysis of their task performance showed that operators in remote condition actually performed statistically significantly better with the visual force feedback display than without it. These results indicate a promising new interface design direction for low-cost telemanipulation.

Haptic feedback in teleoperation of flying robots can enable safe flight in unknown and densely cluttered environments. It is typically part of the robot's control scheme and used to aid navigation and collision avoidance via artificial force fields displayed to the operator. However, to achieve fully immersive embodiment in this context, high fidelity force feedback is needed. In this paper we present a telepresence scheme that provides haptic feedback of the external forces or wind acting on the robot, leveraging the ability of a state-of-the-art flying robot to estimate these values online. As a result, we achieve true force feedback telepresence in flying robots by rendering the actual forces acting on the system. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first telepresence scheme for flying robots that is able to feedback real contact forces and does not depend on their representations. The proposed event-based teleoperation scheme is stable under varying latency conditions. Secondly, we present a haptic interface design such that any haptic interface with at least as many force-sensitive and active degrees of freedom as the flying robot can implement this telepresence architecture. The approach is validated experimentally using a Skydio R1 autonomous flying robot in combination with a ForceDimension sigma.7 and a Franka Emika Panda as haptic devices.