Single Stroke Aerial Robot Light Painting

Abstract

This paper investigates trajectory generation alternatives for creating single-stroke light paintings with a small quadrotor robot. We propose to reduce the cost of a minimum snap piecewise polynomial quadrotor trajectory passing through a set of waypoints by displacing those waypoints towards or away from the camera while preserving their projected position. It is in regions of high curvature, where waypoints are close together, that we make modifications to reduce snap, and we evaluate two different strategies: one that uses a full range of depths to increase the distance between close waypoints, and another that tries to keep the final set of waypoints as close to the original plane as possible. Using a variety of one-stroke animal illustrations as targets, we evaluate and compare the cost of different optimized trajectories, and discuss the qualitative and quantitative quality of flights captured in long exposure photographs.