In recent years, a host of Hollywood blockbusters – including The Fast and the Furious 7, Jurassic World, and The Wolf of Wall Street – have included aerial tracking shots provided by drone helicopters outfitted with cameras.
Those shots required separate operators for the drones and the cameras, and careful planning to avoid collisions. But a team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and ETH Zurich hope to make drone cinematography more accessible, simple, and reliable.