Collaborative tracking for robotic tasks

This paper describes how to integrate tracking functions on a mobile robot. Tracking is required during autonomous robot navigation in different situations: landmark tracking to guarantee real-time robot localization, target tracking for a sensor based motion or obstacle tracking to control an obstacle avoidance procedure. These objects - landmarks, targets, and obstacles - have different characteristics: this paper shows that a single tracking method could not overcome all the tracking tasks. Several methods must be integrated on the robot. A tracker controller is in charge to activate a specific method with respect to the object type and to a transition model used to recover the tracking failures. This method is validated using four trackers, based on: template differences, set of points, lines and snakes. Experimental results provided on numerous image sequences are presented.