DroneNavigator: Using Leashed and Free-Floating Quadcopters to Navigate Visually Impaired Travelers

Although a large number of navigation support systems for visually impaired people have been proposed in the past, navigating through unknown environments is still a major challenge for visually impaired travelers. Existing systems provide navigation information through headphones, speakers or tactile actuators. In this paper, we propose to use small lightweight quadcopters instead to provide navigation information for people with visual impairments. Using a leashed or free-floating quadcopter, the user is navigated by the distinct sound that the quadcopter emits and a haptic stimulus provided by the leash. In a user with 14 visually impaired participants, we compared leashed quadcopter navigation, free-floating quadcopter navigation, and traditional audio navigation. The results show that compared to audio navigation, participants navigate significantly faster with a free-floating quadcopter and make fewer navigation errors using the quadcopter navigation methods.