CinemAirSim: A Camera-Realistic Robotics Simulator for Cinematographic Purposes

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular in the film and entertainment industries, in part because of their maneuverability and perspectives they enable. While there exists methods for controlling the position and orientation of the drones for visibility, other artistic elements of the filming process, such as focal blur, remain unexplored in the robotics community. The lack of cinematographic robotics solutions is partly due to the cost associated with the cameras and devices used in the filming industry, but also because state-of-the-art photo-realistic robotics simulators only utilize a full in-focus pinhole camera model which does not incorporate these desired artistic attributes. To overcome this, the main contribution of this work is to endow the well-known drone simulator, AirSim, with a cinematic camera as well as extend its API to control all of its parameters in real time, including various filming lenses and common cinematographic properties. In this paper, we detail the implementation of our AirSim modification, CinemAirSim, present examples that illustrate the potential of the new tool, and highlight the new research opportunities that the use of cinematic cameras can bring to research in robotics and control.