Multiposture leg tracking for temporarily vision restricted environments based on fusion of laser and radar sensor data

Journal of Field Robotics, vol. 40, pp. 1620–1638

Abstract

Abstract Leg tracking is an established field in mobile robotics and machine vision in general. These algorithms, however, only distinguish the scene between leg and nonleg detections. In application fields like firefighting, where people tend to choose squatting or crouching over standing postures, those methods will inevitably fail. Further, tracking based on a single sensor system may reduce the overall reliability if brought to outdoor or complex environments with limited vision on the target objectives. Therefore, we extend our recent work to a multiposture detection system based on laser and radar sensors, that are fused to allow for maximal reliability and accuracy in scenarios as complex as indoor firefighting with vastly limited vision. The proposed tracking pipeline is trained and extensively validated on a new data set. We show that the radar tracker reaches state‐of‐the‐art performance, and that laser and fusion tracker outperform recent methods.

Authors 3

1. Nils Mandischer corresponding Aachen Institute of Mechanism Theory

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Mechanism Theory, Machine Dynamics and Robotics RWTH Aachen University Aachen Germany

2. Ruikun Hou Aachen Institute of Mechanism Theory

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Mechanism Theory, Machine Dynamics and Robotics RWTH Aachen University Aachen Germany

3. Burkhard J. Corves Aachen Institute of Mechanism Theory

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Mechanism Theory, Machine Dynamics and Robotics RWTH Aachen University Aachen Germany