Scientific Paper - haptic feedback shared control

User study on haptic forces on a joystick that help with steering a drone

Date: August 2026
Role: Software development, data integrity, organisation
Topics: ROS 2, Python, Haptics, User study, Statistics, Software architecture
Links: Code on GitHub

Drawing of a participant from behind at a table. The participant holds a joystick with force feedback in the right hand. On the screen in front of them, a drone flies between circular obstacles towards a goal. A blue arrow at the joystick and one at the drone show the force that pushes away from the nearest obstacle.

What it was about

The research seminar “Cooperative and Haptic Human-Machine Interactions” was about a joystick that generates forces of its own. When the user steers a drone, for example, it pushes their hand away from an obstacle. Human and assistance system thus steer together; this is known as Haptic Shared Control. The forces are meant to bring the pilot to the goal more safely without patronising them.

My work

Within the team, I helped develop the force model and conducted and evaluated the user study. Together, we wrote the paper “Phased Haptic Shared Control for Safe and Autonomy-Preserving UAV Teleoperation” on this work. It has not been published yet.

I set up the experiment in ROS 2 so that the experimenter can control the whole procedure via a dashboard. This includes recovery methods: if part of the system crashes, no data is lost, and the participant continues from the same point.