A Unified Haptic Teleoperation Platform for Safe UAV Navigation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in applications such as inspection and search and rescue, yet safe and intuitive teleoperation remains challenging in cluttered and GPS-denied environments. This paper presents a modular haptic teleoperation framework that integrates Unity, ROS2, optical motion capture, a physical UAV platform, and a stylus-based haptic device for bidirectional human–robot interaction. Operator inputs are mapped to UAV velocity commands, while obstacle proximity is rendered as continuous haptic feedback to enhance spatial awareness. A Control Barrier Function (CBF)-based command filtering layer is incorporated to modify unsafe velocity commands in real time. The system is evaluated through both Unity-based simulation and real-world experiments using a DJI Tello UAV and OptiTrack motion capture. In the virtual experiments, four conditions were compared: baseline, CBF only, haptic only, and CBF + haptic. The combined CBF + haptic condition reduced the average task completion time from 62.9 s to 42.8 s and resulted in no observed collisions under the evaluated virtual scenarios. The real-world experiments further confirmed stable force–distance behavior, bounded latency, and feasible haptic-assisted UAV navigation in a constrained indoor environment. These results indicate that combining haptic feedback with CBF-based safety control can improve teleoperation efficiency, safety, and usability under the tested conditions while providing a practical step toward simulation-to-real haptic UAV teleoperation.