Senior Research Assistant : Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Robotics Lab (Aug 2016 - Present)

 

My drone research was accepted into the poster presentation, so I joined about 100 others to talk about my work to fellow human-robot interaction enthusiasts!

My drone research was accepted into the poster presentation, so I joined about 100 others to talk about my work to fellow human-robot interaction enthusiasts!

I am currently working in the UAV Robotics Lab developing an iOS app that allows me to voice control our DJI Phantom 4 drone. Using Nuance's SpeechKit and DJI's Mobile-iOS SDK, I plan to make most of the fundamental commands for the drone's behavior controllable by voice, freeing up the user's hands during flight. I am developing the app in Xcode, using both Objective-C and Swift and using regular expression matching to be able to use a wide variety of voice commands. Below are some photos from a trip my department sent me on in March to present my research in Vienna, Austria. I have also included the short paper my professor and I wrote as well as the poster I presented. At the bottom of the page are a few videos documenting the process!

Update January 2017: Great news! My professor, Dr. Sebastian van Delden, and I submitted a short paper to the ACM/IEEE Human-Robotics Interaction Conference (HRI 2017) and it was accepted! I will be presenting our poster in March in Vienna, Austria!

Update March 2017: Successful poster presentation in Vienna, Austria! The Human-Robotic Interaction Conference was amazing! Here are some images from my trip:

Made it to #vienna !! Even the ride from the airport was pretty! Going to start exploring! 🇦🇹

A post shared by megan🔸 landau (@meganlandau) on

 

Publication:

Citation:

Megan Landau and Sebastian van Delden. 2017. A System Architecture of Hands-Free UAV Drone Control Using Intuitive Voice Commands. Short Paper in the Companion Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 12th Annual International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. HRI 2017. Vienna, Austria. March 6-9, 2017.

Poster for Presentation:

I used this poster for both the presentation for the HRI 2017 Conference as well as our school's 29th Annual Department of Science and Mathematics Poster Session in April 2017.

 
 

Technologies Used:

Diagram of System Architecture:

 
 

Video Library of Ongoing Research:

Below are some videos I have made over the course of the Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 semesters. I like to get a feature working and then do a little video of it so I can have a kind of video journal of the whole process.

 
 

Here, I am using Nuance's SpeechKit and DJI's SDK to voice control our Phantom 4 drone. I just use commands in the format of "Go north 6 feet". I use a regular expression to find patterns in my recognized speech, so that directions can include N, S, E, W and distance can be in feet or meters.

NSEW Command Instructions

Here I have the drone following North, South, East, West directional commands and I also give it a distance (this can be in feet or meters). I may have crashed the drone quite a few times trying to get this feature to work! I use phrases such as "Drone fly West 5 meters" or "Go North 8 feet".

 

Success! In this video, I show that I can use an app and Nuance's speech recognition software to voice activate our DJI Phantom 4 drone. Next step: directions! I first use the command "Link" to check that I have established a link to the drone. And then I use "Take off" and "land" commands.

Take Off and Land by Voice

This was a very exciting day! I had just started getting successful voice recognition through Nuance's platform and using the parsed recognition string to command the drone. As you can see, I am still a little nervous of the landing.

 

This is a little demonstration of the iOS app I wrote in Swift that simulates what we are working on in the College of Charleston's UAV Robotics Lab: voice controlling the DJI Phantom Drone. In this app, I use Nuance's speech recognition kit to voice control the little drone animation.

Second Drone App

Here is my second app that I ever made (because I am too embarrassed to put up the first one!!) was a voice controlled animation that you can tell to take off, land, and fly up or down. This is a little video demonstration of the iOS app I wrote in Swift which simulates what we would be working on with the actual drone later on in the semester.

 

Submission Video for NCWIT Collegiate Award Application Video

This is a video I put together to give an overview of the research involved in this project. I submitted this video in consideration for a scholarship.