Steering a simulated unmanned aerial vehicle using a head-slaved camera and HMD
Sjoerd C. de Vries, Pieter Padmos · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
Military use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is gaining importance. Video cameras in these devices are often operated with joysticks and their image is displayed on a CRT. In this experiment, the simulated camera of a simulated UAV was slaved to the operator's head movements and displayed using a helmet mounted display (HMD). The task involved maneuvering a UAV along a winding course marked by tress. The influence of several parameters of the set-up on a set of flight handling characteristics was assessed. To enable variation of FOV and to study the effect of the HMD optics, a simulated HMD consisting of a head slaved window, was projected on a screen. One of the FOVs, generated in this way, corresponded with the FOV of the real HMD, enabling a comparison. The results show that the simulated HMD yields a significantly better performance that the real HMD. Performance with a FOV of 17 degrees is significantly lower than with 34 or 57 degrees. An image lag of 50 ms, typical of pan-and-tilt servo motor systems, has a small but significant influence on steering accuracy. Monocular and stereoscopic presentation did not result in significant performance differences.