Shoot Better Drone Videos With a Single Word

Carnegie Mellon University Research maps emotions to robotic behavior - 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.