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1. Effect of Illumination on Human Drone Interaction Tasks: An Exploratory Study

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181321651123  

   Ozkan Yerebakan, Mustafa; Hao, Shuai; Xu, Kun; Gheisari, Masoud; Jeelani, Idris; Hu, Boyi (September 2021, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)

   With recent changes by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) opening the possibility of more areas for drones to be used, such as delivery, there will be increasingly more intera ctions between humans and drones soon. Although current human drone interaction (HDI) investigate what factors are necessary for safe interactions, very few has focused on drone illumination. Therefore, in this study, we explored how illumination affects users’ perception of the drone through a distance perception task. Data analysis did not indicate any significant effects in the normal distance estimation task for illumination or distance conditions. However, most participants underestimated the distance in the normal distance estimation task and indicated that the LED drone was closer when it wa s illuminated during the relative distance estimation task, even though the drones were equidistant. In future studies, factors such as the weather conditions, lighting patterns, and height of the drone will be explored. 

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2. Investigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Gesture Perceptibility and Impact of Viewpoint Variance

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9561094  

   Fletcher, Paul; Luther, Angeline; Duncan, Brittany; Detweiler, Carrick (May 2021, 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA))

   Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight paths have been shown to communicate meaning to human observers, similar to human gestural communication. This paper presents the results of a UAV gesture perception study designed to assess how observer viewpoint perspective may impact how humans perceive the shape of UAV gestural motion. Robot gesture designers have demonstrated that robots can indeed communicate meaning through gesture; however, many of these results are limited to an idealized range of viewer perspectives and do not consider how the perception of a robot gesture may suffer from obfuscation or self-occlusion from some viewpoints. This paper presents the results of three online user-studies that examine participants' ability to accurately perceive the intended shape of two-dimensional UAV gestures from varying viewer perspectives. We used a logistic regression model to characterize participant gesture classification accuracy, demonstrating that viewer perspective does impact how participants perceive the shape of UAV gestures. Our results yielded a viewpoint angle threshold from beyond which participants were able to assess the intended shape of a gesture's motion with 90% accuracy. We also introduce a perceptibility score to capture user confidence, time to decision, and accuracy in labeling and to understand how differences in flight paths impact perception across viewpoints. These findings will enable UAV gesture systems that, with a high degree of confidence, ensure gesture motions can be accurately perceived by human observers. 

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3. Investigation of unmanned aerial vehicle gesture perceptibility and impact of viewpoint variance

   Fletcher, P.; Detweiler, C.; Duncan, B. (May 2021, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation)

   null (Ed.)

   Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight paths have been shown to communicate meaning to human observers, similar to human gestural communication. This paper presents the results of a UAV gesture perception study designed to assess how observer viewpoint perspective may impact how humans perceive the shape of UAV gestural motion. Robot gesture designers have demonstrated that robots can indeed communicate meaning through gesture; however, many of these results are limited to an idealized range of viewer perspectives and do not consider how the perception of a robot gesture may suffer from obfuscation or self-occlusion from some viewpoints. This paper presents the results of three online user-studies that examine participants’ ability to accurately perceive the intended shape of two-dimensional UAV gestures from varying viewer perspectives. We used a logistic regression model to characterize participant gesture classification accuracy, demonstrating that viewer perspective does impact how participants perceive the shape of UAV gestures. Our results yielded a viewpoint angle threshold from beyond which participants were able to assess the intended shape of a gesture’s motion with 90% accuracy. We also introduce a perceptibility score to capture user confidence, time to decision, and accuracy in labeling and to understand how differences in flight paths impact perception across viewpoints. These findings will enable UAV gesture systems that, with a high degree of confidence, ensure gesture motions can be accurately perceived by human observers. 

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4. Demystifying visual awareness: Peripheral encoding plus limited decision complexity resolve the paradox of rich visual experience and curious perceptual failures

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01968-1  

   Rosenholtz, Ruth (April 2020, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics)

   Abstract Human beings subjectively experience a rich visual percept. However, when behavioral experiments probe the details of that percept, observers perform poorly, suggesting that vision is impoverished. What can explain this awareness puzzle? Is the rich percept a mere illusion? How does vision work as well as it does? This paper argues for two important pieces of the solution. First, peripheral vision encodes its inputs using a scheme that preserves a great deal of useful information, while losing the information necessary to perform certain tasks. The tasks rendered difficult by the peripheral encoding include many of those used to probe the details of visual experience. Second, many tasks used to probe attentional and working memory limits are, arguably, inherently difficult, and poor performance on these tasks may indicate limits on decision complexity. Two assumptions are critical to making sense of this hypothesis: (1) All visual perception, conscious or not, results from performing some visual task; and (2) all visual tasks face the same limit on decision complexity. Together, peripheral encoding plus decision complexity can explain a wide variety of phenomena, including vision’s marvelous successes, its quirky failures, and our rich subjective impression of the visual world. 

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5. On the Ambient Optic Array: James Gibson’s Insights About the Phenomenon of Chiaroscuro

   https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669520952097  

   Todd, James T. (September 2020, i-Perception)

   null (Ed.)

   In 1966, James Gibson first presented his theory of the ambient optic array, and he proposed a new field of ecological optics that he hoped would advance our knowledge on this topic. This study will consider how his ideas have largely come to fruition over the past 50 years. It reviews the research on the visual perception of three-dimensional shape from shading, the effects of ambient light from surface interreflections on observers’ perceptions, the perception of the light field, and the perception of surface materials. Finally, it also considers Gibson’s impact on these developments. 

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