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. INDEX TERMS Autonomous cinematography, Multi-robot system, Unmanned aerial vehicles.
The use of multiple aerial vehicles for autonomous missions is turning into commonplace. In many of these applications, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have to cooperate and navigate in a shared airspace, becoming 3D collision avoidance a relevant issue. Outdoor scenarios impose additional challenges: (i) accurate positioning systems are costly; (ii) communication can be unreliable or delayed; and (iii) external conditions like wind gusts affect UAVs’ maneuverability. In this paper, we present 3D-SWAP, a decentralized algorithm for 3D collision avoidance with multiple UAVs. 3D-SWAP operates reactively without high computational requirements and allows UAVs to integrate measurements from their local sensors with positions of other teammates within communication range. We tested 3D-SWAP with our team of custom-designed UAVs. First, we used a Software-In-The-Loop simulator for system integration and evaluation. Second, we run field experiments with up to three UAVs in an outdoor scenario with uncontrolled conditions (i.e., noisy positioning systems, wind gusts, etc). We report our results and our procedures for this field experimentation.
This paper describes a method for autonomous aerial cinematography with distributed lighting by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although camera-carrying multirotor helicopters have become commonplace in cinematography, their usage is limited to scenarios with sufficient natural light or of lighting provided by static artificial lights. We propose to use a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles as a tool for filming a target under illumination from various directions, which is one of the fundamental techniques of traditional cinematography. We decompose the multi-UAV trajectory optimization problem to tackle non-linear cinematographic aspects and obstacle avoidance at separate stages, which allows us to re-plan in real time and react to changes in dynamic environments. The performance of our method has been evaluated in realistic simulation scenarios and field experiments, where we show how it increases the quality of the shots and that it is capable of planning safe trajectories even in cluttered environments.
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