Laser-based pedestrian tracking in outdoor environments by multiple mobile robots

This paper presents an outdoor laser-based pedestrian tracking system by multiple mobile robots. Each robot detects pedestrians from its own laser scan image using an occupancy-grid-based method, and the robot tracks the detected pedestrians via Kalman filtering and global-nearest-neighbor (GNN)-based data association. The tracking data is broadcast to multiple robots, and the results are combined using covariance intersection (CI). For pedestrian tracking, each robot identifies its own posture using real-time-kinematic (RTK)-GPS and laser scan matching. Using our tracking method, all the robots share the tracking data with each other, so that individual robots always recognize pedestrians that are invisible to other robots. The experimental results of tracking three pedestrians by three mobile robots validate the proposed method.