Related papers: Directing Cinematographic Drones
As the market for commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) booms, there is an increasing number of small, teleoperated or autonomous aircraft found in protected or sensitive airspace. Existing solutions for removal of these…
With the increasing integration of robots into human life, their role in architectural spaces where people spend most of their time has become more prominent. While motion capabilities and accurate localization for automated robots have…
Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents "dynamic…
The autonomous formation flight of fixed-wing drones is hard when the coordination requires the actuation over their speeds since they are critically bounded and aircraft are mostly designed to fly at a nominal airspeed. This paper proposes…
Automating drone-assisted processes is a complex task. Many solutions rely on trajectory generation and tracking, whereas in contrast, path-following control is a particularly promising approach, offering an intuitive and natural approach…
Autonomous drone racing has risen as a challenging robotic benchmark for testing the limits of learning, perception, planning, and control. Expert human pilots are able to fly a drone through a race track by mapping pixels from a single…
We address the problem of assigning a team of drones to autonomously capture a set desired shots of a dynamic target in the presence of obstacles. We present a two-stage planning pipeline that generates offline an assignment of drone to…
In recent years, there is a noteworthy advancement in autonomous drone racing. However, the primary focus is on attaining execution times, while scant attention is given to the challenges of dynamic environments. The high-speed nature of…
In this paper we first contribute a large scale online study (N=400) to better understand aesthetic perception of aerial video. The results indicate that it is paramount to optimize smoothness of trajectories across all keyframes. However,…
We present a system to capture video footage of human subjects in the real world. Our system leverages a quadrotor camera to automatically capture well-composed video of two subjects. Subjects are tracked in a large-scale outdoor…
Recent advances in trajectory replanning have enabled quadrotor to navigate autonomously in unknown environments. However, high-speed navigation still remains a significant challenge. Given very limited time, existing methods have no strong…
In drone racing, the time-minimum trajectory is affected by the drone's capabilities, the layout of the race track, and the configurations of the gates (e.g., their shapes and sizes). However, previous studies neglect the configuration of…
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…
A flight trajectory defines how exactly a quadrocopter moves in the three-dimensional space from one position to another. Automatic flight trajectory planning faces challenges such as high computational effort and a lack of precision.…
In practical applications, autonomous quadrotors are still facing significant challenges, such as the detection and avoidance of very small and even dynamic obstacles (e.g., tree branches, power lines). In this paper, we propose a compact,…
We present Agentic Aerial Cinematography: From Dialogue Cues to Cinematic Trajectories (ACDC), an autonomous drone cinematography system driven by natural language communication between human directors and drones. The main limitation of…
Capturing and reconstructing a human actor's motion is important for filmmaking and gaming. Currently, motion capture systems with static cameras are used for pixel-level high-fidelity reconstructions. Such setups are costly, require…
Drones are being used in many industries for a variety of applications, including inspecting bridges, surveying farm land, and delivering cargo. Automating these kinds of scenarios requires more than following a sequence of GPS waypoints;…
Planning time-optimal trajectories for quadrotors in cluttered environments is a challenging, non-convex problem. This paper addresses minimizing the traversal time of a given collision-free geometric path without violating bounds on…
This paper presents a novel approach to motion planning for two-wheeled drones that can drive on the ground and fly in the air. Conventional methods for two-wheeled drone motion planning typically rely on gradient-based optimization and…