Can a Robot Become a Movie Director? Learning Artistic Principles for Aerial Cinematography Aerial filming is constantly gaining importance due to the recent advances in drone technology. It invites many intriguing, unsolved problems at the intersection of aesthetical and scientific challenges. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning agent which supervises motion planning of a filming drone by making desirable shot mode selections based on aesthetical values of video shots. Unlike most of the current stateoftheart approaches that require explicit guidance by a human expert, our drone learns how to make favorable viewpoint selections by experience. We propose a learning scheme that exploits aesthetical features of retrospective shots in order to extract a desirable policy for better prospective shots. We train our agent in realistic AirSim simulations using both a handcrafted reward function as well as reward from direct human input. We then deploy the same agent on a real DJI M210 drone in order to test the generalization capability of our approach to real world conditions. To evaluate the success of our approach in the end, we conduct a comprehensive user study in which participants rate the shot quality of our methods. Videos of the system in action can be seen at https:youtu.beqmVw6mfyEmw.

Towards a Robust Aerial Cinematography Platform: Localizing and Tracking Moving Targets in Unstructured Environments The use of drones for aerial cinematography has revolutionized several applications and industries that require live and dynamic camera viewpoints such as entertainment, sports, and security. However, safely controlling a drone while filming a moving target usually requires multiple expert human operators; hence the need for an autonomous cinematographer. Current approaches have severe reallife limitations such as requiring fully scripted scenes, highprecision motioncapture systems or GPS tags to localize targets, and prior maps of the environment to avoid obstacles and plan for occlusion.In this work, we overcome such limitations and propose a complete system for aerial cinematography that combines: (1) a visionbased algorithm for target localization; (2) a realtime incremental 3D signeddistance map algorithm for occlusion and safety computation; and (3) a realtime camera motion planner that optimizes smoothness, collisions, occlusions and artistic guidelines. We evaluate robustness and realtime performance in series of field experiments and simulations by tracking dynamic targets moving through unknown, unstructured environments. Finally, we verify that despite removing previous limitations, our system achieves stateoftheart performance.