DronOS: A Flexible Open-Source Prototyping Framework for Interactive Drone Routines

We present DronOS, a rapid prototyping framework that can track, control, and automate drone routines. Previous research in the domain of Human-Drone Interaction relied on hardware or proprietary vendor-dependent libraries that had to be exclusively programmed for specific use cases. This forces users to stick with a drone manufacturer or model as well as limiting users in transferring their drone control logic to other drones. To overcome the aforementioned issues, our framework uses low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and applies to a variety of already available or self-crafted drones. To assess the usability of DronOS, we evaluate three drone programming modes: Unity Scripting, Vive Scripting, and Vive Realtime. We find that Vive Scripting required the least subjective workload in programming drone routines while Unity Scripting yielded the highest accuracy and Vive Realtime the least task completion time. We anticipate requirements for drone prototyping frameworks that target novice and expert users as operators.