Autonomous Planning for Multiple Aerial Cinematographers
arXiv:2005.07237 · doi:10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341622
Abstract
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.
arXiv comment7 pages, published in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2020