Optimizing Long-Term Robot Tracking with Multi-Platform Sensor Fusion

Abstract

Monitoring a fleet of robots requires stable long-term tracking with re-identification, which is yet an unsolved challenge in many scenarios. One application of this is the analysis of autonomous robotic soccer games at RoboCup. Tracking in these games requires handling of identically looking players, strong occlusions, and non-professional video recordings, but also offers state information estimated by the robots. In order to make effective use of the information coming from the robot sensors, we propose a robust tracking and identification pipeline. It fuses external noncalibrated camera data with the robots' internal states using quadratic optimization for tracklet matching. The approach is validated using game recordings from previous RoboCup World Cup tournaments.