Abstract
This paper presents a methodology to achieve Robotic Aerial Tracking of a mobile – human – subject within a previously-unmapped environment, potentially cluttered with unknown structures. The proposed system initially employs a high-end Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, capable of fully-autonomous estimation and flight control. This platform also carries a high-level Perception and Navigation Unit, which performs the tasks of 3D-visual perception, subject detection, segmentation, and tracking, which allows the aerial system to follow the human subject as they perform free unscripted motion, in the perceptual – and equally importantly – in the mobile sense. To this purpose, a navigation synthesis which relies on an attractive/repulsive forces-based approach and collision-free path planning algorithms is integrated into the scheme. Employing an incrementally-built map model which accounts for the ground subject’s and the aerial vehicle’s motion constraints, the Robotic Aerial Tracker system is capable of achieving continuous tracking and reacquisition of the mobile target.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Grocholsky, B., Keller, J., Kumar, V., Pappas, G.: Cooperative air and ground surveillance. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 13, 16–25 (2006)
Zikou, L., Papachristos, C., Tzes, A.: The power-over-tether system for powering small UAVs: tethering-line tension control synthesis. In: Mediterranean Conference on Control Automation (MED), pp. 715–721 (2015)
Papachristos, C., Alexis, K., Tzes, A.: Technical activities execution with a tiltrotor uas employing explicit model predictive control. In: World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), Cape Town, South Africa, pp. 11036–11042 (2014)
Pounds, P.E.I., Bersak, D., Dollar, A.: Grasping from the air: hovering capture and load stability. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2011), pp. 2491–2498 (2011)
Alexis, K., Huerzeler, C., Siegwart, R.: Hybrid modeling and control of a coaxial unmanned rotorcraft interacting with its environment through contact. In: 2013 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Karlsruhe, Germany, pp. 5397–5404 (2013)
Weiss, S., Scaramuzza, D., Siegwart, R.: Monocular-slam based navigation for autonomous micro helicopters in GPS-denied environments. J. Field Robot. 28, 854–874 (2011)
Lin, L., Goodrich, M.: UAV intelligent path planning for wilderness search and rescue. In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2009, pp. 709–714 (2009)
Campoy, P., Correa, J., Mondragn, I., Martnez, C., Olivares, M., Mejas, L., Artieda, J.: Computer vision onboard UAVs for civilian tasks. In: Valavanis, K., Oh, P., Piegl, L. (eds.) Unmanned Aircraft Systems, pp. 105–135. Springer, Netherlands (2009)
Merz, T., Kendoul, F.: Dependable low-altitude obstacle avoidance for robotic helicopters operating in rural areas. J. Field Robot. 30, 439–471 (2013)
Geyer, C., Singh, S., Chamberlain, L.J.: Avoiding collisions between aircraft: State of the art and requirements for UAVs operating in civilian airspace (2008)
Rudol, P., Doherty, P.: Human body detection and geolocalization for UAV search and rescue missions using color and thermal imagery. In: 2008 IEEE Aerospace Conference, pp. 1–8. IEEE (2008)
Papachristos, C., Alexis, K., Tzes, A.: Dual-authority thrust-vectoring of a tri-tiltrotor employing model predictive control. J. Intell. Robot. Syst. 1–34 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0231-1
Papachristos, C., Tzoumanikas, D., Tzes, A.: Aerial robotic tracking of a generalized mobile target employing visual and spatio-temporal dynamic subject perception. In: IEEE-RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011), pp. 4319–4324 (2015)
Hornung, A., Wurm, K., Bennewitz, M., Stachniss, C., Burgard, W.: OctoMap: an efficient probabilistic 3D mapping framework based on octrees. Auton. Robots 34, 189–206 (2013)
Nieuwenhuisen, M., Droeschel, D., Schneider, J., Holz, D., Labe, T., Behnke, S.: Multimodal obstacle detection and collision avoidance for micro aerial vehicles. In: European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR 2013), pp. 7–12 (2013)
Karaman, S., Frazzoli, E.: Incremental sampling-based algorithms for optimal motion planning. CoRR abs/1005.0416 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Papachristos, C., Tzoumanikas, D., Alexis, K., Tzes, A. (2015). Autonomous Robotic Aerial Tracking, Avoidance, and Seeking of a Mobile Human Subject. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9474. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27857-5_40
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27857-5_40
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27856-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27857-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)