Increasing perceived safety in motion planning for human-drone interaction

Conference paper (2023)

Authors

Sanne van Waveren KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Rasmus Rudling KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Iolanda Leite KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Patric Jensfelt KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Christian Pek KTH Royal Institute of Technology
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Published Date

2023

Language

English

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Abstract

Safety is crucial for autonomous drones to operate close to humans. Besides avoiding unwanted or harmful contact, people should also perceive the drone as safe. Existing safe motion planning approaches for autonomous robots, such as drones, have primarily focused on ensuring physical safety, e.g., by imposing constraints on motion planners. However, studies indicate that ensuring physical safety does not necessarily lead to perceived safety. Prior work in Human-Drone Interaction (HDI) shows that factors such as the drone's speed and distance to the human are important for perceived safety. Building on these works, we propose a parameterized control barrier function (CBF) that constrains the drone's maximum deceleration and minimum distance to the human and update its parameters on people's ratings of perceived safety. We describe an implementation and evaluation of our approach. Results of a withinsubject user study (Ng= 15) show that we can improve perceived safety of a drone by adjusting to people individually.