The pros make it look easy, but filmmaking with a drone can be anything but.
It takes skill to fly the often expensive piece of equipment smoothly and without crashing. Once one has mastered flying, there are still camera angles, panning speeds, trajectories and flight paths to plan.
A team of researchers imagined that with all the sensors and processing power onboard a drone and embedded in its camera, there must be a better way to capture the perfect shot.
"Sometimes you just want to tell the drone to make an exciting video," said Rogerio Bonatti (pictured at left), a Ph.D. candidate in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.
Bonatti was part of a team from CMU, the University of Sao Paulo and Facebook AI Research that developed a model which enables a drone to shoot a video based on a desired emotion or viewer reaction. The drone uses camera angles, speeds and flight paths to generate a video that could be exciting, calm, enjoyable or nerve-wracking — depending on what the filmmaker tells it.
The team presented their paper on the work at the 2021 International Conference on Robotics and Automation this month. The presentation can be viewed on YouTube.
"We are learning how to map semantics, like a word or emotion, to the motion of the camera," Bonatti said.
