Distributed vision-based flying cameras to film a moving target

Formations of camera-equipped quadrotors (flying cameras) have the actuation agility to track moving targets from multiple viewing angles. In this paper we propose an infrastructure-free distributed control method for multiple flying cameras tracking a moving object. The proposed vision-based servoing can deal with noisy and missing target observations, accounts for quadrotor oscillations and does not require an external positioning system. The flight direction of each camera is inferred via geometric derivation, and the formation is maintained by employing a distributed algorithm that uses the target position information on the camera plane and the position of neighboring flying cameras. Simulations show that the proposed solution enables the tracking of a moving target by the cameras flying in formation despite noisy target detections and when the target is outside some of the fields of view.