Towards Using Drones as Personal Spatial Search Assistants

Abstract

Personal drones are becoming popular supporting humans in diverse tasks such as photography. This emphasizes the need for further research on other applications but also the potential benefits and problems of human-drone interaction in general. In this work, we investigate the application of a quad-copter as search assistant providing spatial support and highlighting objects in indoor environments. We present an indoor control system based on optical tracking implemented inside the Unity game engine and a hardware extension of the quad-copter in the form of an LED headlight. In a first user study (N=10) in a controlled laboratory environment, we found that the drone assistant was well received by users and that it increased efficiency in terms of search time in comparison to the control condition without drone support.