1 research outputs found
Do You See What I See? Coordinating Multiple Aerial Cameras for Robot Cinematography
Aerial cinematography is significantly expanding the capabilities of
film-makers. Recent progress in autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has
further increased the potential impact of aerial cameras, with systems that can
safely track actors in unstructured cluttered environments. Professional
productions, however, require the use of multiple cameras simultaneously to
record different viewpoints of the same scene, which are edited into the final
footage either in real time or in post-production. Such extreme motion
coordination is particularly hard for unscripted action scenes, which are a
common use case of aerial cameras. In this work we develop a real-time
multi-UAV coordination system that is capable of recording dynamic targets
while maximizing shot diversity and avoiding collisions and mutual visibility
between cameras. We validate our approach in multiple cluttered environments of
a photo-realistic simulator, and deploy the system using two UAVs in real-world
experiments. We show that our coordination scheme has low computational cost
and takes only 1.17 ms on average to plan for a team of 3 UAVs over a 10 s time
horizon. Supplementary video: https://youtu.be/m2R3anv2AD