A Model for Mediating Multi-Modal Human Intent into Safe Maneuvers for UAVs

2026-07-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the safety risks associated with directly controlling unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) via multimodal human commands—such as speech or gestures—which may inadvertently violate constraints related to terrain, inter-agent spacing, or flight envelopes. To mitigate these risks, the authors propose a request–evaluation–execution pipeline that models human inputs as bounded maneuver requests and maps them to constrained motion primitives satisfying formal requirement specifications. These specifications explicitly encode preconditions, invariants, guard conditions, and postconditions, enabling runtime verification and reactive synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that the system reliably interprets commands from both speech and graphical interfaces and safely executes them as compliant UAV maneuvers that adhere to all specified constraints.

Abstract

Direct human interaction with autonomous UAV systems can be enabled through modalities such as speech, gestures, and graphical interfaces. However, interpreting such inputs as directly executable commands introduces safety risks in dynamic environments. Operator requests may conflict with terrain constraints, inter-UAV separation requirements, or flight-envelope limitations. In this paper, we present a requirements-governed maneuver-response model that mediates multi-modal human intent into safe UAV maneuvers by treating operator inputs as bounded maneuver requests rather than direct commands. Requested maneuvers are mapped to constrained motion primitives and processed through a structured request-evaluate-execute pipeline. Each request is interpreted with associated confidence, validated against terrain, separation, workspace, and flight-envelope constraints, and either constrained, rejected, or executed under continuous runtime monitoring. We further formalize the approach as a requirements-based specification model in which maneuver primitives are associated with explicit preconditions, invariants, guard conditions, and postconditions governing admissibility, execution safety, and emergency handling. These requirements support runtime verification and future reactive synthesis approaches. We present an initial lab-based validation demonstrating that voice and GUI-based inputs can be reliably interpreted and safely executed as constrained maneuver requests.

Problem

• multi-modal intent
• UAV safety
• maneuver mediation
• human-UAV interaction
• safety constraints

Innovation

• multi-modal intent
• maneuver primitives
• requirements-governed model
• runtime verification
• UAV safety