  Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's) are becoming increasingly popular
in the film and entertainment industries in part because of their
maneuverability and the dynamic shots and perspectives they enable. While there
exists methods for controlling the position and orientation of the drones for
visibility, other artistic elements of the filming process, such as focal blur
and light control, remain unexplored in the robotics community. The lack of
cinemetographic robotics solutions is partly due to the cost associated with
the cameras and devices used in the filming industry, but also because
state-of-the-art photo-realistic robotics simulators only utilize a full
in-focus pinhole camera model which does incorporate these desired artistic
attributes. To overcome this, the main contribution of this work is to endow
the well-known drone simulator, AirSim, with a cinematic camera as well as
extended its API to control all of its parameters in real time, including
various filming lenses and common cinematographic properties. In this paper, we
detail the implementation of our AirSim modification, CinemAirSim, present
examples that illustrate the potential of the new tool, and highlight the new
research opportunities that the use of cinematic cameras can bring to research
in robotics and control. https://github.com/ppueyor/CinematicAirSim
