Two Families of Algorithms to Film Sport Events with Flying Robots

In this paper, we introduce two families of distributed algorithms to control the movement of groups of flying robots that are monitoring an event by moving over the field where the event takes place, while optimizing some specific objective. In order to show the effectiveness of our algorithms, we formulate the Sport Event Filming (SEF) problem. The objective of the problem is to maximize the satisfaction of event viewers while minimizing the distance traveled by the camera-drones. We propose two families of solutions to solve the dynamic version of the problem, where the flying robots do not have any knowledge of the input sequence and move in reaction to the movements of the protagonists of the event. The first family (Nearest Neighbor)is based on a technique used in robotic systems, whereas the second family (Ball Movement Interception) is designed based on specific characteristics of the SEF problem. We present extensive simulation results for both families in terms of average viewer satisfaction and travelled distance for the flying robots, when several parameters vary.