Autonomous Planning for Multiple Aerial Cinematographers
This addresses the challenge of coordinating multiple UAVs for outdoor event filming, which is an incremental improvement in autonomous cinematography.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomous media production with multiple UAVs by proposing a planning algorithm that maximizes filming time under battery constraints, demonstrating efficiency for small teams (3-5 UAVs) with performance close to optimum in field experiments.
This paper proposes a planning algorithm for autonomous media production with multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in outdoor events. Given filming tasks specified by a media Director, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the filming time considering battery constraints. As we conjecture that the problem is NP-hard, we consider a discretization version, and propose a graph-based algorithm that can find an optimal solution of the discrete problem for a single UAV in polynomial time. Then, a greedy strategy is applied to solve the problem sequentially for multiple UAVs. We demonstrate that our algorithm is efficient for small teams (3-5 UAVs) and that its performance is close to the optimum. We showcase our system in field experiments carrying out actual media production in an outdoor scenario with multiple UAVs.