Generic Drone Control Platform for Autonomous Capture of Cinema Scenes

Abstract

The movie industry has been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a new tool to produce more and more complex and aesthetic camera shots. However, the shooting process currently rely on manual control of the drones which makes it difficult and sometimes inconvenient to work with. In this paper we address the lack of autonomous system to operate generic rotary-wing drones for shooting purposes. We propose a global control architecture based on a high-level generic API used by many UAV. Our solution integrates a compound and coupled model of a generic rotary-wing drone and a Full State Feedback strategy. To address the specific task of capturing cinema scenes, we combine the control architecture with an automatic camera path planning approach that encompasses cinematographic techniques. The possibilities offered by our system are demonstrated through a series of experiments.

The Use of Drones in Spain: Towards a Platform for Controlling UAVs in Urban Environments

“…Among their many applications, UAVs can be used for social purposes such as search and rescue operations [ 2 ], automatic forest fire monitoring and measurement [ 3 ] or disaster management [ 4 ]. Commercial tasks also appear within sectors such as agriculture [ 5 ], construction [ 6 ], mapping and geology [ 7 ], surveillance [ 8 ] or in the cinema industry [ 9 ].…”

Sensor-Augmented Neural Adaptive Bitrate Video Streaming on UAVs

“…Inexpensive commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rising rapidly, making drones a popular host of a wide class of applications, including environment monitoring [1], precision agriculture [2], photography [3], policing [4], firefighting [5], and package delivery [6]. An essential functionality enabling these applications is to record high-definition videos of superior quality and seamlessly share them with ground base stations or clients for manual inspection and further analysis.…”

Minimum-time B-spline trajectories with corridor constraints. Application to cinematographic quadrotor flight plans

“…It usually requires the generation of smooth trajectories, satisfying high level specifications, based on the vocabulary and the specifications of a cinematographer rather than of a drone pilot. Efforts in this regard have been provided through different works Galvane et al (2013), Joubert et al (2016), Roberts and Hanrahan (2016), Fleureau et al (2016), Engelhardt et al (2016), Gebhardt et al (2016), Joubert (2017), Nägeli et al (2017a), Nägeli et al (2017b), Galvane et al (2017) and Galvane et al (2018), and have yield impressive results. Such autonomous sequences are often specified in the form of waypoints to join successively, sometime along with speed references, flight corridors or camera behaviors.…”

“…An alternative approach consists into generating first a cinematographic path by interpolation of two camera poses, see for instance Fleureau et al (2016). Then, a steering method (such as Galvane et al (2013)) is used to complete the path.…”