Welcome to AERO-GUIDE

AERO-GUIDE is a research project aiming at enhancing Human-Aerial Robot Interaction. The project, created and led by Dr. Marco Tognon, is funded by the ETH Career Seeds grants and is carried out at the Autonomous System Lab (ASL) of ETH.

AERO-GUIDE aims to be the first investigation into the novel research field of physical Human-Aerial Robot Interaction (pHARI). Although physical HRI with ground robots has been extensively investigated, the use of aerial robots demands a careful treatment of the interaction and the stability of the system. To start the investigation, we propose to study a system which is the first of its kind: a human holding a handle physically connected by a cable to an aerial vehicle. The robot shall guide the human using forces only, e.g., to help visually impaired persons.   
 
ASL@ETH

 

 

Latest news

2021/5/14 - Successful position guiding

This week the team managed to show a first successful position tracking. Currently, the base station operator sends a target position to the drone which then guides the human to the desired position.
2021/5/14 - Depth estimation

This week, the depth estimation of the human has been realized and verified. Thanks to the calibration shapes on the handle of the operator, an algorithm estimates the distance between the drone and the human.
2021/5/07 - Preliminary human velocity estimantion

Oliver just obtained some promising results about the vision-based estimation of the human velocity. To be able to apply the right amount of force to the cable that guides the person, the velocity of the human has to be taken into account.
2021/4/30 - Safe enough?

We are setting up our platform for the next set of experiments. This means tuning and making the system as reliable as possible. When drones physically interact with humans, safety is a crucial aspect.