Director Tools for Autonomous Media Production with a Team of Drones

Ángel Montes-Romero,Arturo Torres-González,Alberto Messina,Fulvio Negro,Sabino Metta,Jesús Capitán,Maurizio Montagnuolo,Aníbal Ollero

doi:10.3390/app10041494

Ángel Montes-Romero, Arturo Torres-González + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/app10041494

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Abstract

This paper proposes a set of director tools for autonomous media production with a team of drones. There is a clear trend toward using drones for media production, and the director is the person in charge of the whole system from a production perspective. Many applications, mainly outdoors, can benefit from the use of multiple drones to achieve multi-view or concurrent shots. However, there is a burden associated with managing all aspects in the system, such as ensuring safety, accounting for drone battery levels, navigating drones, etc. Even though there exist methods for autonomous mission planning with teams of drones, a media director is not necessarily familiar with them and their language. We contribute to close this gap between media crew and autonomous multi-drone systems, allowing the director to focus on the artistic part. In particular, we propose a novel language for cinematography mission description and a procedure to translate those missions into plans that can be executed by autonomous drones. We also present our director’s Dashboard, a graphical tool allowing the director to describe missions for media production easily. Our tools have been integrated into a real team of drones for media production and we show results of example missions.

Highlights

There is a clear trend toward using drones for aerial cinematography and media production in general
We propose a set of tools for mission description in media production
This paper described a set of tools to support autonomous media production with multiple drones

Summary

Introduction

There is a clear trend toward using drones for aerial cinematography and media production in general. The main reasons for the emergence of this technology are twofold: First, small drones can be equipped with high-quality cameras, but, at the same time, they are not too expensive, which makes them appealing for amateur and professional users. Due to their maneuverability, they broaden the aesthetic possibilities for media production, as they can create novel and unique shots. Media production applications to cover outdoor events can benefit from the use of teams of drones, mainly to produce multi-view shots and film multiple action points concurrently. The main issue with a multi-drone system for media production is its complexity of operation A multi-drone system could be deployed (e.g., instead of camera cranes) to operate in such large-scale, outdoor scenarios without requiring the pre-existence of complex infrastructure.

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