Automated camera planning to film robot operations

Automatic 3D animation generation techniques are becoming increasingly popular in different areas related to computer graphics such as video games and animated movies. They help automate the filmmaking process even by non professionals without or with minimal intervention of animators and computer graphics programmers. Based on specified cinematographic principles and filming rules, they plan the sequence of virtual cameras that the best render a 3D scene. In this paper, we present an approach for automatic movie generation using linear temporal logic to express these filming and cinematography rules. We consider the filming of a 3D scene as a sequence of shots satisfying given filming rules, conveying constraints on the desirable configuration (position, orientation, and zoom) of virtual cameras. The selection of camera configurations at different points in time is understood as a camera plan, which is computed using a temporal-logic based planning system (TLPlan) to obtain a 3D movie. The camera planner is used within an automated planning application for generating 3D tasks demonstrations involving a teleoperated robot arm on the the International Space Station (ISS). A typical task demonstration involves moving the robot arm from one configuration to another. The main challenge is to automatically plan the configurations of virtual cameras to film the arm in a manner that conveys the best awareness of the robot trajectory to the user. The robot trajectory is generated using a path-planner. The camera planner is then invoked to find a sequence of configurations of virtual cameras to film the trajectory.