Human-Friendly Control of Drones and Drone Swarms Using Natural Language and AI-Based Task Decomposition

The deployment of drones and swarms of small drones for operational purposes is rapidly increasing the load on human operators especially if interaction relies on low-level control interfaces. This paper reports work carried out as part of a project on human-centric drone control by natural language interaction and AI-augmented task understanding. With the proposed method, operators are able to give high-level commands to single or small groups of drones and task-representations are structured from these commands and executed with predefined mission primitives. The focus of the system is to promote transparency and operator supervision through explicit feedback about the interpretation of tasks and task execution.