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.
@article{arxiv.2005.07237,
title = {Autonomous Planning for Multiple Aerial Cinematographers},
author = {Luis-Evaristo Caraballo and Ángel Montes-Romero and José-Miguel Díaz-Báñez and Jesús Capitán and Arturo Torres-González and Aníbal Ollero},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.07237},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
7 pages, published in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2020