Fly Jacket

What if you could fly a drone the way you move your body — intuitively, without controllers or joysticks? Fly Jacket is a wearable exosuit developed at EPFL that turns full-body motion into drone commands. By sensing the orientation of the torso and arms through embedded IMUs, the suit maps natural posture changes directly to flight directions — lean forward to go forward, tilt sideways to turn.

The project spanned hardware design, sensor fusion, machine learning, and human factors. A key challenge was that no two people move the same way: the mapping that feels natural to one user is awkward for another. This led to a personalisation pipeline that calibrates to each pilot's movement style in minutes, making the interface immediately usable without prior training.

Fly Jacket was validated through a series of user studies — both in simulation and with a real drone — demonstrating significantly lower cognitive load and faster task completion compared to conventional gamepad control. The project produced multiple publications and was featured in international media.