Usability Evaluation for Drone Mission Planning in Virtual Reality

There has been a lot of research conducted on human-robot interaction (HRI) with drones as well as human-computer interaction (HCI) with virtual reality (VR). However, little work was done on VR as HRI, even less for VR and drones in particular. In this paper, we evaluate the usability of VR interfaces used to control drones through working with UC Berkeley's Immersive Semi-Autonomous Aerial Command System (ISAACS) project, which experiments with new ways for humans to interact with drones in a VR environment. Our experiment setting focuses on the drone mission planning phase and on creating an onboarding experience for new users. We develop a usability evaluation framework for the ISAACS VR system, and use this framework to conduct two iterations of user testing and prototyping with a human-centered design process.