355 research outputs found
Autonomous Execution of Cinematographic Shots with Multiple Drones
This paper presents a system for the execution of autonomous cinematography
missions with a team of drones. The system allows media directors to design
missions involving different types of shots with one or multiple cameras,
running sequentially or concurrently. We introduce the complete architecture,
which includes components for mission design, planning and execution. Then, we
focus on the components related to autonomous mission execution. First, we
propose a novel parametric description for shots, considering different types
of camera motion and tracked targets; and we use it to implement a set of
canonical shots. Second, for multi-drone shot execution, we propose distributed
schedulers that activate different shot controllers on board the drones.
Moreover, an event-based mechanism is used to synchronize shot execution among
the drones and to account for inaccuracies during shot planning. Finally, we
showcase the system with field experiments filming sport activities, including
a real regatta event. We report on system integration and lessons learnt during
our experimental campaigns
A Multiple-UAV Software Architecture for Autonomous Media Production
The use of UAVs in media production has taken off during the past few years, with increasingly more functions becoming automated. However, current solutions leave a lot to be desired with regard to autonomy and drone fleet support. This paper presents a novel, complete software architecture suited to an intelligent, multiple-UAV platform for media production/cinematography applications, covering outdoor events (e.g., sports) typically distributed over large expanses. Increased multiple drone decisional autonomy, so as to minimize production crew load, and improved multiple drone robustness/safety mechanisms (e.g., regarding communications, flight regulation compliance, crowd avoidance and emergency landing mechanisms) are supported.publishersversionpublishe
Recommended from our members
Towards a Smart Drone Cinematographer for Filming Human Motion
Affordable consumer drones have made capturing aerial footage more convenient and accessible. However, shooting cinematic motion videos using a drone is challenging because it requires users to analyze dynamic scenarios while operating the controller. In this thesis, our task is to develop an autonomous drone cinematography system to capture cinematic videos of human motion. We understand the system's filming performance to be influenced by three key components: 1) video quality metric, which measures the aesthetic quality -- the angle, the distance, the image composition -- of the captured video, 2) visual feature, which encapsulates the visual elements that influence the filming style, and 3) camera planning, which is a decision-making model that predicts the next best movement. By analyzing these three components, we designed two autonomous drone cinematography systems using both heuristic-based methods and learning-based methods.For the first system, we designed an Autonomous CinemaTography system -- "ACT" by proposing a viewpoint quality metric focusing on the visibility of the 3D human skeleton of the subject. We expanded the application of human motion analysis and simplified manual control by assisting viewpoint selection using a through-the-lens method. For the second system, we designed an imitation-based system that learns the artistic intention of the cameramen through watching professional aerial videos. We designed a camera planner that analyzes the video contents and previous camera motion to predict future camera motion. Furthermore, we propose a planning framework, which can imitate a filming style by ``seeing" only one single demonstration video of such style. We named it ``one-shot imitation filming." To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that extends imitation learning to autonomous filming. Experimental results in both simulation and field test exhibit significant improvements over existing techniques and our approach managed to help inexperienced pilots capture cinematic videos
Director Tools for Autonomous Media Production with a Team of Drones
Featured Application:
This work can be applied for media production with aerial cameras.
The system supports media crew to film outdoor events with an autonomous fleet of drones.This paper proposes a set of director tools for autonomous media production with a team
of drones. There is a clear trend toward using drones for media production, and the director is
the person in charge of the whole system from a production perspective. Many applications,
mainly outdoors, can benefit from the use of multiple drones to achieve multi-view or concurrent
shots. However, there is a burden associated with managing all aspects in the system, such as
ensuring safety, accounting for drone battery levels, navigating drones, etc. Even though there exist
methods for autonomous mission planning with teams of drones, a media director is not necessarily
familiar with them and their language. We contribute to close this gap between media crew and
autonomous multi-drone systems, allowing the director to focus on the artistic part. In particular,
we propose a novel language for cinematography mission description and a procedure to translate
those missions into plans that can be executed by autonomous drones. We also present our director’s
Dashboard, a graphical tool allowing the director to describe missions for media production easily.
Our tools have been integrated into a real team of drones for media production and we show results
of example missions.Unión Europea Sub.No 73166
Optimal Trajectory Planning for Cinematography with Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
This paper presents a method for planning optimal trajectories with a team of
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) performing autonomous cinematography. The
method is able to plan trajectories online and in a distributed manner,
providing coordination between the UAVs. We propose a novel non-linear
formulation for this challenging problem of computing multi-UAV optimal
trajectories for cinematography; integrating UAVs dynamics and collision
avoidance constraints, together with cinematographic aspects like smoothness,
gimbal mechanical limits and mutual camera visibility. We integrate our method
within a hardware and software architecture for UAV cinematography that was
previously developed within the framework of the MultiDrone project; and
demonstrate its use with different types of shots filming a moving target
outdoors. We provide extensive experimental results both in simulation and
field experiments. We analyze the performance of the method and prove that it
is able to compute online smooth trajectories, reducing jerky movements and
complying with cinematography constraints.Comment: This paper has been published as: Optimal trajectory planning for
cinematography with multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Alfonso Alcantara and
Jesus Capitan and Rita Cunha and Anibal Ollero. Robotics and Autonomous
Systems. 103778 (2021) 10.1016/j.robot.2021.10377
- …