WAVE your arms in the right way, and a drone taxiing along a runway will stop, turn and find a parking spot.
Drones on aircraft-carrier decks, but humans control them during taxiing. With piloted aircraft, navy flight-deck marshals use a to instruct pilots to, for instance, cut their engines, open weapon bay doors or move to a refuelling bay.
To test whether these gestures could be recognised by a computer, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues wrote an algorithm that analyses 3-second clips from a depth-sensing camera trained on a person performing flight-deck gestures. The system recorded body, arm, wrist, hand and finger positions, and was subsequently able to recognise a flight-deck command correctly 76 per cent of the time.
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The team says it is now working on improving recognition levels. The research will appear in an upcoming issue of .
“I can’t see why this wouldn’t work ultimately,” says Peter van Blyenburgh, head of UVS International, a drone trade group. “The gestures are clearly defined – an image sensor should be able to pick them up.”
