Autonomous drone cinematographer: Using artistic principles to create smooth, safe, occlusion-free trajectories for aerial filming
This enables automatic, aesthetically pleasing aerial filming for individuals, addressing a domain-specific need in cinematography.
The paper tackled the problem of generating smooth, safe, and occlusion-free trajectories for autonomous drone cinematography, achieving 65 obstacle and occlusion avoidances over 1.25 hours of flight time with 5 Hz re-planning.
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 5 Hz with a 10 s time horizon. We robustly film human actors, cars and bicycles performing different motion among obstacles, using various shot types.