Congratulations to Associate Professor Zhao Shengdong and his collaborators for clinching the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2017 Best Systems Paper Award ! RSS is the most competitive international conference in robotics, and was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in mid-July. This award is presented in memory of Dr. Seth Teller, to research papers that in his own words, go “from impossible to possible in principle, to practical and usable by real people, and finally to devices that are affordable.”

The winning paper, XPose: Reinventing User Interaction with Flying Cameras is about a new touch-based interactive system for photo taking. XPose takes advantage of the autonomous flying capability of a drone-mounted camera, and allows users to interact with photos directly such that they can focus on taking photos instead of piloting the drone.

With XPose, photo-taking in static scenes involves two stages:

Stage 1: Users explore the “photo space” through predefined interaction modes: Orbit, Pano, and Zigzag. Under each mode, the camera visits many points of view (POVs) and takes exploratory photos through autonomous drone flying.

Stage 2: Users restore a selected POV with the help of a gallery preview and uses direct manipulation gestures to refine the POV and compose a final photo.

For more information, we encourage you to read the full paper and watch the demo video.