AirCap – Aerial Outdoor Motion Capture

Abstract: In this talk I will present an overview of the project Aerial Outdoor Motion Capture (AirCap). AirCap's goal is to achieve markerless and unconstrained motion capture (MoCap) of humans, and in future, animals, in natural outdoor environments. We have developed a flying MoCap system using a team of autonomous aerial robots with on-board, monocular RGB cameras. Our system is endowed with a range of novel functionalities. These include, i) cooperative detection and tracking that enables DNN-based detectors on board flying robots, ii) active cooperative perception in aerial robot teams to minimize joint tracking uncertainty, and iii) markerless human pose and shape estimation using images acquired from multiple views and approximately calibrated cameras. We have conducted several real experiments along with ground truth comparisons to validate our approach and system. For outdoor scenarios, we have demonstrated the first fully autonomous flying MoCap system involving multiple aerial robots.