Safe Teleoperation of Dynamic UAVs Through Control Barrier Functions

Abstract

This paper presents a method for assisting human operators to teleoperate highly dynamic systems such as quadrotors inside a constrained environment with safety guarantees. Our method enables human operators to focus on manually operating and flying quadrotor systems without the need to focus on avoiding potential obstacles. This is achieved with the presented supervisory controller overriding human input to enforce safety constraints when necessary. This method can be used as an assistive training solution for novice pilots to begin flying quadrotors without crashing them. Our supervisory controller uses an Exponential control barrier function based quadratic program to achieve safe human teleoperated flight. We demonstrate and validate our control approach through several experiments with multiple users with varying skill levels for three different scenarios of a quadrotor flying in a motion capture environment with virtual and physical constraints.