arXiv:2509.24921 · v2

CineWild: Balancing Art and Robotics for Ethical Wildlife Documentary Filmmaking

首次提交 2025-09-29 23:24

版本更新 2026-11-11 19:34

雷达观测 2026-11-13 14:16

摘要

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become powerful tools across domains from industry to the arts. In documentary filmmaking, they offer dynamic, otherwise unreachable perspectives, transforming how stories are told. Wildlife documentaries especially benefit, yet UAVs also raise ethical concerns like the risk of disturbing the animals they aim to capture. This paper introduces CineWild, a model predictive control (MPC) formulation for autonomous aerial cinematography that combines robotics, cinematography, and ethics. Building on an MPC solution that jointly controls drone motion and camera focal length, CineWild dynamically adjusts flight paths and camera settings to balance cinematic quality with animal welfare. Key features include adaptive zoom for filming from acoustic and visual safe distances, path-planning that avoids an animal's field of view, and smooth, low-noise maneuvers. CineWild exemplifies interdisciplinary innovation, bridging engineering, visual storytelling, and environmental ethics. We evaluate the formulation in simulation, with ablation studies and a comparison against a cinematographic baseline and a welfare-aware baseline under identical weights, and we demonstrate the perception and camera-actuation pipeline in real-world proof-of-concept trials. We will release the code.