Perching-Based Haptic Guidance for Physical Human–Robot Interaction with Aerial Robots

Abstract

In recent years, the field of Human-Drone Interaction (HDI) has attracted significant attention, particularly in navigation assistance using aerial robots. However, existing approaches rely on non-contact cues or indirect physical connections such as cables, which demand continuous flight and high energy consumption. These limitations shorten interaction time and make direct assistance challenging. To address this issue, we employ a deformable aerial robot with inflatable structures that enables adaptive perching on the human arm. On this platform, we propose a perching-based haptic guidance method in which the robot maintains close contact to deliver directional cues via thrust modulation and provide alerts and arrival feedback through vibration signals. The system further switches feedback modes dynamically according to context, enabling intuitive and flexible guidance beyond conventional methods limited to simple directional cues. Through experiments, we quantitatively evaluated the presented force characteristics and confirmed that perching-based haptic guidance requires less power than continuous flight in the same platform. User experiments further demonstrated that participants could reach target locations without major deviations even when vision and hearing were blocked. Moreover, the entire process of approach, perching, haptic guidance, and deperching was stably executed on the real platform, validating the feasibility of perching-based haptic guidance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to realize close physical Human-Drone Interaction (pHDI) through perching-based haptic guidance.