Drones for live streaming of visuals for people with limited mobility

Abstract

Robotics is the field currently taking its place as a leading candidate for dramatic changes in everyday life. Advances in the past 10 years in sensing, actuator and power technologies have fuelled an explosion of opportunities in this exciting, and surprisingly affordable domain. Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (drones) are being rapidly developed for research, public service, and commercial applications, all around the globe. Drones offer a number of unique affordances to mobile technology research for community empowerment and ‘extreme user’ access: they are relatively inexpensive, easy to operate and to fit with alternative interfaces for people of all abilities, and are readily available. Furthermore, they can carry a payload of light, inexpensive, and off-the-shelf sensors that can be used to support a wide range of research efforts. A potential helping application has been developed in UCD for live streaming of visuals for people with limited mobility. The aim is to use drones and virtual reality as surrogates to provide access to visual information to differently-abled people. This paper will summarize the state of the art in drones research in terms of the affordances to assistive technology. Imagine being able to take any sport or imagine any far-away and otherwise inaccessible cultural heritage or educational site and to bring these rich assets to life within an immersive environment. The paper proposes a system to integrate virtual reality (VR) with a low-cost unmanned, semi-autonomous quad rotor. This quad rotor with a VR headset would allow for first-person vision and manipulation using the Robot Operating System. The system would enable the user to move the quad rotor remotely using natural head movements, which could be tracked by the VR headset and translated into six degrees of freedom commands that would then be sent to the quad rotor. This would facilitate operation when compared to commercially available controller methods, as it would immerse the user in the robot's environment. The paper presents the software components that will allow people off site to strap themselves into a virtual reality headset (i.e. Oculus Rift at the top end of technology, or one of the many emerging affordable VR headsets such as Google cardboard) and then — via footage taken from drone flights and other digital media — to be able to participate virtually, in real time, with other users who are all synchronously immersed in these environments. From the point of view of the camera on the plane overhead, the viewer can get a very good impression of a site, seeing things that you would not normally be visible even during a ‘real’ walk of the same terrain. Overtime, the aim is to facilitate people with limited mobility to have access to live streaming of visuals and thus to experience the sense of empowerment and inclusion that live engagement in physical activity can inspire and support.