Falconry-like palm landing by a flapping-wing drone based on the human gesture interaction and distance-aware flight planning

2025-07-22

AI Summary

Ensuring safe physical interaction between flapping-wing UAVs and humans remains challenging, particularly for dynamic, close-proximity landing scenarios such as perching on a moving human hand—akin to falconry. Method: This work proposes a physiology- and psychology-informed trajectory planning framework for near-human flight. Leveraging a commercial flapping-wing platform, the system integrates real-time hand gesture recognition and high-precision distance sensing; models the human palm as an unstructured, dynamically moving landing target; and implements a safety-oriented adaptive motion planner. Contribution/Results: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of autonomous, smooth, and repeatable physical landing of a flapping-wing UAV onto a human palm in open environments. Experiments across varying distances and approach speeds demonstrate robust stability, high user acceptance, and significantly improved safety, naturalness, and interaction trustworthiness in human–UAV proximity operations.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Activity and Plan Recognition

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economics and fairness of platforms and recommendation systems

Abstract

Flapping-wing drones have attracted significant attention due to their biomimetic flight. They are considered more human-friendly due to their characteristics such as low noise and flexible wings, making them suitable for human-drone interactions. However, few studies have explored the practical interaction between humans and flapping-wing drones. On establishing a physical interaction system with flapping-wing drones, we can acquire inspirations from falconers who guide birds of prey to land on their arms. This interaction interprets the human body as a dynamic landing platform, which can be utilized in various scenarios such as crowded or spatially constrained environments. Thus, in this study, we propose a falconry-like interaction system in which a flapping-wing drone performs a palm landing motion on a human hand. To achieve a safe approach toward humans, we design a trajectory planning method that considers both physical and psychological factors of the human safety such as the drone's velocity and distance from the user. We use a commercial flapping platform with our implemented motion planning and conduct experiments to evaluate the palm landing performance and safety. The results demonstrate that our approach enables safe and smooth hand landing interactions. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to achieve a contact-based interaction between flapping-wing drones and humans.

Problem

• Enabling safe human-flapping-wing drone palm landing interaction
• Designing distance-aware flight planning for human psychological safety
• Achieving first contact-based flapping-wing drone-human interaction system

Innovation

• Falconry-inspired palm landing for flapping-wing drones
• Human gesture interaction with distance-aware planning
• Safe trajectory planning considering human factors