MULTIDRONE overview

The aim of MULTIDRONE project is to develop an innovative intelligent multi-drone team platform for media production to cover outdoor events (e.g., sports) that are typically distributed over large expanses, ranging, for example, from a stadium to an entire city. The drone team, having 4-10 drones, to be managed by the production director and his/her production crew, will have:

• Increased multiple drone decisional autonomy, by minimizing production crew load and required interventions, hence allowing event coverage in the time span of around one hour in an outdoor environment.
• Improved multiple drone robustness and safety mechanisms (e.g., communication robustness/safety, embedded flight regulation compliance, enhanced crowd avoidance and emergency landing mechanisms), enabling it to carry out its mission against errors or crew inaction and to handle emergencies. Such robustness is particularly important, as the drone team will operate close to crowds and/or may face environmental hazards (e.g., wind). Therefore, it must be contextually aware and adaptive, with increased perception of crowds and individual humans.

AUTH in MULTIDRONE

AUTH intends to develop and exploit:

• Techniques for the analysis of multiple video streams from the drone cameras, focusing on human-centered analysis.
• Intelligent shooting techniques for drone-based productions.
• Multiview visual target (persons, objects) tracking methods.

Exploitation of AUTH results will be done by partnering with commercial companies towards licensing and marketing the developed software solutions. Furthermore, being an academic institution, AUTH intends to publish R&D results in scientific journals and conferences, while providing open access to these publications. The developed tools and the authored publications will be exploited in improving education quality at undergraduate and postgraduate level.