Robotics: Science and Systems XIII

XPose: Reinventing User Interaction with Flying Cameras

Ziquan Lan, Mohit Shridhar, David Hsu, Shengdong Zhao

Abstract:

XPose is a new touch-based interactive system for photo taking, designed to take advantage of the autonomous flying capability of a drone-mounted camera. It enables the user to interact with photos directly and focus on taking photos instead of piloting the drone. XPose introduces a two-stage eXplore-and-comPose approach to photo taking in static scenes. In the first stage, the user explores the ''photo space'' through predefined interaction modes: Orbit, Pano, and Zigzag. Under each mode, the camera visits many points of view (POVs) and takes exploratory photos through autonomous drone flying. In the second stage, the user restores a selected POV with the help of a gallery preview and uses direct manipulation gestures to refine the POV and compose a final photo. Our prototype implementation, based on a Parrot Bebop quadcopter, relies mainly on a single monocular camera and works reliably in a GPS-denied environment. A systematic user study indicates that XPose results in more successful user performances in photo-taking tasks than the touchscreen joystick interface widely used in commercial drones today.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Lan-RSS-17, 
    AUTHOR    = {Ziquan Lan AND Mohit Shridhar AND David Hsu AND Shengdong Zhao}, 
    TITLE     = {XPose: Reinventing User Interaction with Flying Cameras}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2017}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Cambridge, Massachusetts}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2017.XIII.006} 
}