Motion Tracking from a Mobile Robot

Motivation
The populated outdoor environment is fairly challenging to contemporary mobile robots due to diverse motions of pedestrians, bicycles, automobiles, etc. Since some objects move faster than the robot, motion detection and estimation for potential collision avoidance are the most fundamental skills that a robot needs to function effectively outdoors.

However, detecting motion of external objects from a moving robot is not easily achievable because there are two independent motions involved: the motion of the robot (and hence the sensors it carries) and the motions of moving objects in the environment. Unfortunately, those two motions are blended together when measured through a sensor such as a camera. In order for a robot to detect moving objects robustly, it should be able to decompose these two independent motions from sensor readings.


Approach
The motion detection process is performed in two steps: the ego-motion compensation of camera images, and the position estimation of moving objects in the image space. For robust detection and tracking, the position estimation process is performed using a Bayes filter, and an adaptive particle filter is utilized for iterative estimation.


Figure 1: Processing sequence for motion detection

The ego-motion of the camera can be estimated by tracking features between images. When the camera moves, two consecutive images, I(t) and I(t-1), are in different coordinate systems. Ego-motion compensation is a transformation from the image coordinates of I(t-1) to that of I(t) so that the two images can be compared directly. The transformation can be estimated using two corresponding feature sets: a set of features in I(t) and a set of corresponding features in I(t-1). However, since there are independently moving objects in the images, a transform model and outlier detection algorithm needs to be designed so that the result of ego-motion compensation is not sensitive to object motions.


Figure 2: Tracked features (green) and outliers (red)

For frame differencing, Image I(t-1) is converted using the transformation model before being compared to the image I(t) in order to eliminate the effect of the camera ego-motion.

(a) difference with compensation (b) difference without compensation
Figure 3: Results of frame differencing

Real outdoor images are contaminated by various noise sources, eg. poor lighting conditions, camera distortion, unstructured and changing shape of objects, etc. Thus perfect ego-motion compensation is rarely achievable. Even assuming that the ego-motion compensation is perfect, the difference image would still contain structured noise on the boundaries of objects because of the lack of depth information from a monocular image. Some of these noise terms are transient and some of them are constant over time. We use a probabilistic model to filter them out and to perform robust detection and tracking. The probability distribution of moving objects in image space is estimated using an adaptive particle, and the final particles are clustered using a mixture of Gaussians for the position estimation.

(a) input (b) particle filter (c) gaussian mixture
Figure 4: Motion detection procedure

Refer to relavant papers for more details.


Experiments
The algorithms are implemented and tested in various outdoor environments using three different robot platforms: robotic helicopter, Segway RMP, and Pioneer2 AT. Each platform has unique characteristics in terms of its ego-motion. The Robotic Helicopter is an autonomous flying vehicle carrying a monocular camera facing downward. Once it takes off and hovers, planar movements become the main motion, and moving objects on the ground stay at a roughly constant distance from the camera most of the time; however, pitch and roll motions for a change of direction still generate complicated video sequences. The Segway RMP a two-wheeled, dynamically stable robot with self-balancing capability. It works like an inverted pendulum; the wheels are driven in the direction that the upper part of the robot is falling, which means the robot body pitches whenever it moves. Especially when the robot accelerates/decelerates, the pitch angle increases seriously. The Pioneer2 AT is a typical four-wheeled, statically stable robot.

(a) robotic helicopter (b) Segway RMP (c) Pioneer2 AT
Figure 5: Robot platforms for experiments

The performance of the tracking algorithm was evaluated by comparing to the positions of manually tracked objects.

Refer to relavant papers for more details.


Relevant Publications
See the publication page.

Video Clips
Experimental Platforms

Those video clips show the ego-motion of each platform.

Helicopter (AVI, 5.7MB) Segway RMP (AVI, 15.8MB) Pioneer2 AT (AVI, 12.3MB)

Particle Filter Output

Those video clips show the output of the particle filter. Red dots indicate the position of particles, and the yellow ellisoid represents the estimated position (and error). The estimated velocity (direction and speed) is also shown using a yellow line inside the ellipsoid. The horizontal bar on the top-left corner shows the number of particles being used. The maximum number of particles was set to 5,000, and the minimum number of particles was set to 500.

Helicopter (AVI, 0.9MB) Segway RMP (AVI, 5.2MB) Pioneer2 AT (AVI, 4.4MB)

Multiple Target Tracking

Automobiles (AVI, 2.6MB)

This clip shows multiple particle filters tracking automobiles. It demonstrates how particle filters are created and destroyed dynamically. Particles are shown only when a filter converges.
Pedestrians (AVI, 3.1MB)

This clip shows multiple particle filters tracking pedestrians. Total four particle filters are created. The fourth one is not shown in the video because it does not converge.
Intersection (AVI, 2.6MB)

This clip demonstrates the stability of multiple particle filters. There are two people walking in different directions, and they intersect in the middle. However, each particle filter succeeds to track its target continuously.

Close the Loop: Follow a Moving Object

Follow a person (AVI, 36.5MB)

This clip shows the Segway RMP robot following a person. When the person enters into the camera field-of-view, the robot starts to follow him. There are automobiles and pedestrians in the background, but the tracking system is not confused by them. When the person stops and stands still, the robot loses the target and also stops. However, when the person start to walk again, the robot detects the motion and start to follow him again.


Acknowledgements
This work is supported in part by DARPA grants DABT63-99-1-0015, and 5-39509-A (via UPenn) under the Mobile Autonomous Robot Software (MARS) program.
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