Cooperative global tracking using multiple sensors

Abstract

Multi-robot systems are increasingly present in nowadays applications. In order to allow an effective decision making, a reliable world representation is required. In a team of robots performing a given task, it is beneficial to share information about the world. In this work, a multi-object, multi-sensor and cooperative tracking method is proposed for the Robocup Standard Platform League (SPL), where two teams of humanoid robots play soccer against each other. Each robot is equipped with two low-cost, noisy, and narrowed-field-of-view cameras and two noisy sonar sensors. In addition, they are endowed with a wireless communication hardware. The on-board computer is a low capacity processing unit (x86 500[Mhz]). The proposed tracking system uses all these hardware elements and it is distributed, in the sense that it is executed in every robot. The proposed tracking system is validated in simulations and in real experiments. Main results show an important improvement on simulated and real results when tracking mobile-objects. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.