InDrone: Visualizing Drone Flight Patterns for Indoor Building Inspection Tasks
Conference Paper
Overview
Overview
abstract
The use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles for indoor building inspection tasks requires users to understand flight patterns (e.g., flight routes, camera focus points, target approach strategies) for maneuvering the aircraft. This study focuses on exploring the visual representation of human behaviors performing indoor building inspection flight operations using drones. An interactive 2D representation of drone flight spatial data-InDrone-was developed to characterize flight patterns during the inspection of indoor markers that were already defined in the inspection area and visualize potential maneuvering difficulties around those markers. This study evaluated InDrone via a user-centered assessment methodology that measured performance and usability ratings. Using visual flight patterns, users identified inspection markers and difficult-to-inspect building areas in 63% (STD = 48%) and 75% (STD = 35%) of the time on average, respectively. Overall, users reported high scores for the usability of InDrone during the flight pattern recognition tasks with a mean score of 77% (STD = 15%). This study contributes to the definition of visual affordances that support the communication of flight patterns for drone indoor building inspection tasks. The InDrone pilot system demonstrates the usefulness of visual affordances to explore drone flight spatial data for indoor building inspections.
