Project leaders: Anke Brock & Jérémie Garcia
Participants: Vinitha Gadiraju & Dong Bach Vo
Flying drones is an increasingly popular activity. However, it is challenging due to the required perceptual and motor skills for following and stabilizing the drone, especially for people with special needs. We are conducting several research to make drone piloting more accessible in several contexts
Our first work is CandyFly is an application supporting people with diverse sensory, cognitive and motor impairments to pilot drones. CandyFly allows to adapt the degree of control to the users’ abilities by taking advantage of the drones’ autopilots and different input devices. CandyFly has been designed and evaluated with more than 15 pilots with various abilities with the support of the Artilect Fablab and the Elheva Association.

We are also exploring how visually impaired pilots would like to use drones by conducting interviews and analyzing the results of a survey. We are currently designing new interaction and feedback modalities to support drone piloting.
Related publications
CHI22
Jérémie Garcia and Anke M. Brock. 2022. CandyFly: Bringing fun to drone pilots with disabilities through adapted and adaptable interactions. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 605, 1–13
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491102.3517568
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdRqpQxL0BE
ASSETS21
Vinitha Gadiraju, Jérémie Garcia, Shaun Kane, and Anke M. Brock. 2021. “It is fascinating to make these beasts fly”: Understanding Visually Impaired People’s Motivations and Needs for Drone Piloting. In The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 42, 1–12.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3441852.3471219