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Wearable gesture control design for unmanned aerial vehicle based on multi-sensor fusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2025

Guang Liu Open the ORCID record for Guang Liu [Opens in a new window] ,
Yang Liu Open the ORCID record for Yang Liu [Opens in a new window] ,
Shurui Fan ,
Weijia Cui ,
Kewen Xia  and
Li Wang
Guang Liu
Affiliation:
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300401, China Innovation and Research Institute of Hebei University of Technology (Shijiazhuang), Shijiazhuang, 050299, China
Yang Liu
Affiliation:
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300401, China Innovation and Research Institute of Hebei University of Technology (Shijiazhuang), Shijiazhuang, 050299, China
Shurui Fan*
Affiliation:
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300401, China Innovation and Research Institute of Hebei University of Technology (Shijiazhuang), Shijiazhuang, 050299, China
Weijia Cui
Affiliation:
The 54th Research Institute of CETC, Shijiazhuang, 050081, China
Kewen Xia
Affiliation:
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300401, China
Li Wang
Affiliation:
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300401, China
*
Corresponding author: Shurui Fan; Email: fansr@hebut.edu.cn
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Abstract

Traditional bulky and complex control devices such as remote control and ground station cannot meet the requirement of fast and flexible control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complex environments. Therefore, a data glove based on multi-sensor fusion is designed in this paper. In order to achieve the goal of gesture control of UAVs, the method can accurately recognize various gestures and convert them into corresponding UAV control commands. First, the wireless data glove fuses flexible fiber optic sensors and inertial sensors to construct a gesture dataset. Then, the trained neural network model is deployed to the STM32 microcontroller-based data glove for real-time gesture recognition, in which the convolutional neural network-Attention mechanism (CNN-Attention) network is used for static gesture recognition, and the convolutional neural network-bidirectional long and short-term memory (CNN-Bi-LSTM) network is used for dynamic gesture recognition. Finally, the gestures are converted into control commands and sent to the vehicle terminal to control the UAV. Through the UAV simulation test on the simulation platform, the average recognition accuracy of 32 static gestures reaches 99.7%, and the average recognition accuracy of 13 dynamic gestures reaches 99.9%, which indicates that the system’s gesture recognition effect is perfect. The task test in the scene constructed in the real environment shows that the UAV can respond to the gestures quickly, and the method proposed in this paper can realize the real-time stable control of the UAV on the terminal side.

Keywords

human-computer interactiongesture recognition networkmulti-sensor fusiondata gloves

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Robotica , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , March 2025 , pp. 816 - 850
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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