Autonomous drone cinematographer: Using artistic principles to create smooth, safe, occlusion-free trajectories for aerial filming - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Autonomous drone cinematographer: Using artistic principles to create smooth, safe, occlusion-free trajectories for aerial filming

Conference Paper, Proceedings of International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER '18), pp. 119 - 129, November, 2018

Abstract

Autonomous aerial cinematography has the potential to enable automatic capture of aesthetically pleasing videos without requiring human intervention, empowering
individuals with the capability of high-end film studios. Current approaches either only handle off-line trajectory generation, or offer strategies that reason over
short time horizons and simplistic representations for obstacles, which result in jerky movement and low real-life applicability. In this work we develop a method for aerial filming that is able to trade off shot smoothness, occlusion, and cinematography guidelines in a principled manner, even under noisy actor predictions. We present a novel algorithm for real-time covariant gradient descent that we use to efficiently find the desired trajectories by optimizing a set of cost functions. Experimental results show that our approach creates attractive shots, avoiding obstacles and occlusion 65 times over 1.25 hours of flight time, re-planning at 5Hz with a 10s time horizon. We robustly film human actors, cars and bicycles performing different motion among obstacles, using various shot types.

BibTeX

@conference{Bonatti-2018-111051,
author = {Rogerio Bonatti and Zhang Yanfu and Sanjiban Choudhury and Wenshan Wang and Sebastian Scherer},
title = {Autonomous drone cinematographer: Using artistic principles to create smooth, safe, occlusion-free trajectories for aerial filming},
booktitle = {Proceedings of International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER '18)},
year = {2018},
month = {November},
pages = {119 - 129},
publisher = {Springer},
keywords = {Motion planning, cinematography, UAV, visual tracking},
}