Multi-robot Task Assignment for Aerial Tracking with Viewpoint Constraints

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 shots and locally optimizes online the viewpoint. Given desired shot parameters, the high-level planner uses a visibility heuristic to predict good times for capturing each shot and uses an Integer Linear Program to compute drone assignments. An online Model Predictive Control algorithm uses the assignments as reference to capture the shots. The algorithm is validated in hardware with a pair of drones and a remote controlled car.

[1]  Ravindra K. Ahuja,et al.  Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications , 1993 .

[2]  Elaheh Fata,et al.  Persistent monitoring in discrete environments: Minimizing the maximum weighted latency between observations , 2012, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[3]  Steven M. Drucker,et al.  Intelligent Camera Control in a Virtual Environment , 1994 .

[4]  Marc Christie,et al.  Intuitive and efficient camera control with the toric space , 2015, ACM Trans. Graph..

[5]  Marc Christie,et al.  Directing Cinematographic Drones , 2017, ACM Trans. Graph..

[6]  Sebastian Scherer,et al.  Autonomous aerial cinematography in unstructured environments with learned artistic decision‐making , 2019, J. Field Robotics.

[7]  Marc Christie,et al.  The director's lens: an intelligent assistant for virtual cinematography , 2011, ACM Multimedia.

[8]  Zhengyuan Zhou,et al.  Smarter Lions: Efficient Cooperative Pursuit in General Bounded Arenas , 2020, SIAM J. Control. Optim..

[9]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Performance based task assignment in multi-robot patrolling , 2013, SAC '13.

[10]  WächterAndreas,et al.  On the implementation of an interior-point filter line-search algorithm for large-scale nonlinear programming , 2006 .

[11]  Dani Lischinski,et al.  Creating and chaining camera moves for quadrotor videography , 2018, ACM Trans. Graph..

[12]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Visibility-based persistent monitoring with robot teams , 2015, 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[13]  Alexander Domahidi,et al.  Real-time planning for automated multi-view drone cinematography , 2017, ACM Trans. Graph..

[14]  Bin Wang,et al.  Example-driven virtual cinematography by learning camera behaviors , 2020, ACM Trans. Graph..

[15]  Mac Schwager,et al.  Intercepting Rogue Robots: An Algorithm for Capturing Multiple Evaders With Multiple Pursuers , 2017, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[16]  Patrick Olivier,et al.  Camera Control in Computer Graphics , 2006, Eurographics.

[17]  Rita Cunha,et al.  Optimal Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Drone Cinematography , 2019, 2019 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR).

[18]  Simon Lacroix,et al.  Multi-robot target detection and tracking: taxonomy and survey , 2016, Auton. Robots.

[19]  Ioannis Pitas,et al.  Shot Type Feasibility in Autonomous UAV Cinematography , 2019, ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[20]  Otmar Hilliges,et al.  Optimizing for aesthetically pleasing quadrotor camera motion , 2018, ACM Trans. Graph..

[21]  Moritz Diehl,et al.  CasADi: a software framework for nonlinear optimization and optimal control , 2018, Mathematical Programming Computation.

[22]  Michael Gleicher,et al.  Through-the-lens camera control , 1992, SIGGRAPH.

[23]  Ioannis Pitas,et al.  High-Level Multiple-UAV Cinematography Tools for Covering Outdoor Events , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting.

[24]  B. Faverjon,et al.  Probabilistic Roadmaps for Path Planning in High-Dimensional Con(cid:12)guration Spaces , 1996 .

[25]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Scalable and practical pursuit-evasion with networked robots , 2009, Intell. Serv. Robotics.

[26]  Edison Pignaton de Freitas,et al.  Multi-UAV Based Crowd Monitoring System , 2020, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

[27]  Bernhard Rinner,et al.  Cooperative Robots to Observe Moving Targets: Review , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.

[28]  Sebastian Scherer,et al.  Do You See What I See? Coordinating Multiple Aerial Cameras for Robot Cinematography , 2020, ArXiv.

[29]  Javier Alonso-Mora,et al.  Chance-Constrained Collision Avoidance for MAVs in Dynamic Environments , 2019, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.