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 a solution for the infrastructure-free distributed control of multiple flying cameras tracking an object. The proposed approach is a vision-based servoing that can deal with noisy and missing target observations, accounts for the 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 information of the target position on the camera plane and the position of neighboring flying cameras. Simulations show that the proposed solution allows the tracking of a moving target by the cameras flying in formation also with noisy target detections, and when the target is outside some of fields of view or lost for a few frames