UAV for Everyone : An Intuitive Control Alternative for Drone Racing Competitions

As many technological innovations, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) were created for military purposes. However, these aircrafts are now a reality accessible for common civilians and are used to explore new possibilities in areas like cinema, photography or surveillance. The technology easily reached other application fields and turned into a new sports category as well, supported by many drone racing competitions that happen around the world. There are many alternatives to control a quadcopter, but the most accurate relies on a robust and heavy handheld remote controller that requires dexterity to be a good pilot. This limits the control of the UAV to users comfortable with this kind of interaction, discarding people with reduced fine motor skills, hand malformations or elders with low learning capacity from the possibility of piloting a quadcopter and participate in competition events. An alternative to these remote controllers should be developed to overpass the mentioned disadvantages. The solution proposed in this paper is an intuitive and accurate control system made of two small and lightweight wearable devices capable of detecting patterns based on motion events. These patterns are then sent to a mobile application responsible for controlling the drone. Wearing the described devices like a high-tech glove, the users can pilot the UAV through simple and intuitive upper limb movements, being the changes in the orientation of each device over time identified as a specific pattern. This solution presents a new approach to the control of UAV that improves the ease of piloting them and decreases the time that is required to learn how to handle them.