Mike Roberts is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University advised by Pat Hanrahan. Mike’s work is at the intersection of computer graphics and robotics, where he focuses on using drones to support human creativity. Mike has interned at Harvard University, and more recently at Microsoft Research. Mike’s joint work with the Harvard Center for Brain Science was published on the cover of Cell in 2015, and has been featured in BBC Horizon, The Guardian, Huffington Post, National Geographic, Nature News, The New York Times, and Popular Science. In 2013, Mike co-developed the Introduction to Parallel Programming course at Udacity, which has enrolled over 80,000 students.
Drones are becoming a popular camera platform due to their maneuverability, small size, and low cost. Indeed, drones are being used to film scenes in a growing number of Hollywood movies, and are emerging as a powerful tool for 3D content creation. However, drones remain difficult to control, both for humans and for computers. In this talk, I will present my ongoing work aiming to make it easier for humans to interact with drones, focusing specifically on two creative domains: cinematography and 3D modeling. I will begin by presenting an interactive tool for designing drone camera shots, describing the key insights and algorithms that inform its design. I will show examples of ambitious aerial cinematography that have been created using this tool, by users with absolutely no experience flying drones. I will then present a fully automatic end-to-end system for aerial 3D scanning. I will describe the underlying trajectory optimization algorithms that power the system, and I will demonstrate that these algorithms enable the system to reconstruct large real-world scenes with state-of-the-art geometric fidelity.