Director Tools for Autonomous Media Production with a Team of Drones

Featured Application This work can be applied for media production with aerial cameras. The system supports media crew to film outdoor events with an autonomous fleet of drones. 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.