This paper proposes a multi-sensor based approach to detect, track, and localize a quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Specifically, a pipeline is developed to process monocular RGB and thermal video (captured from a fixed platform) to detect and track the UAV in our FoV. Subsequently, a 2D planar lidar is used to allow conversion of pixel data to actual distance measurements, and thereby enable localization of the UAV in global coordinates. The monocular data is processed through a deep learning-based object detection method that computes an initial bounding box for the UAV. The thermal data is processed through a thresholding and Kalman filter approach to detect and track the bounding box. Training and testing data are prepared by combining a set of original experiments conducted in a motion capture environment and publicly available UAV image data. The new pipeline compares favorably to existing methods and demonstrates promising tracking and localization capacity of sample experiments.
Autonomous Navigation of Cloud-Controlled Quadcopters in Confined Spaces Using Multi-Modal Perception and LLM-Driven High Semantic Reasoning
Department of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程系）；Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology（拉贾沙希工程与技术大学）；Department of Industrial and Production Engineering（工业与生产工程系）；Shahjalal University of Science and Technology（沙赫jalal科学与技术大学）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉工程与技术大学）；Department of Urban and Regional Planning（城市与区域规划系）；Department of Computer Science Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；United International University（联合国际大学）
Mila - Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Université de Montréal（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所，蒙特利尔大学）；Alternova Tech SAS（Alternova科技公司）；Universidad Autónoma de Occidente（西部自治大学）
Autonomous landing is a capability that is essential to achieve the full potential of multi-rotor drones in many social and industrial applications. The implementation and testing of this capability on physical platforms is risky and resource-intensive; hence, in order to ensure both a sound design process and a safe deployment, simulations are required before implementing a physical prototype. This paper presents the development of a monocular visual system, using a software-in-the-loop methodology, that autonomously and efficiently lands a quadcopter drone on a predefined landing pad, thus r…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
We report on the teleoperation system DronePick which provides remote object picking and delivery by a human-controlled quadcopter. The main novelty of the proposed system is that the human user continuously gets the visual and haptic feedback for accurate teleoperation. DronePick consists of a quadcopter equipped with a magnetic grabber, a tactile glove with finger motion tracking sensor, hand tracking system, and the Virtual Reality (VR) application. The human operator teleoperates the quadcopter by changing the position of the hand. The proposed vibrotactile patterns representing the locati…
The conceptual design and flight controller of a novel kind of quadcopter are presented. This design is capable of morphing the shape of the UAV during flight to achieve position and attitude control. We consider a dynamic center of gravity (CoG) which causes continuous variation in a moment of inertia (MoI) parameters of the UAV in this design. These dynamic structural parameters play a vital role in the stability and control of the system. The length of quadcopter arms is a variable parameter, and it is actuated using attitude feedback-based control law. The MoI parameters are computed in re…
University of Cincinnati（辛辛那提大学）；Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
In this paper, we present an autonomous flight controller for a quadcopter with thrust vectoring capabilities. This UAV falls in the category of multirotors with tilt-motion enabled rotors. Since the vehicle considered is over-actuated in nature, the dynamics and control allocation have to be analysed carefully. Moreover, the possibility of hovering at large attitude maneuvers of this novel vehicle requires singularity-free attitude control. Hence, quaternion state feedback is utilized to compute the control commands for the UAV motors while avoiding the gimbal lock condition experienced by Eu…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）
We propose TRADE for robust tracking and 3D localization of a moving target in cluttered environments, from UAVs equipped with a single camera. Ultimately TRADE enables 3d-aware target following. Tracking-by-detection approaches are vulnerable to target switching, especially between similar objects. Thus, TRADE predicts and incorporates the target 3D trajectory to select the right target from the tracker's response map. Unlike static environments, depth estimation of a moving target from a single camera is a ill-posed problem. Therefore we propose a novel 3D localization method for ground targ…
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center（合作 medianet 创新中心）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；CloudWalk Technology Co., Ltd（云从科技股份有限公司）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Institute for Infocomm Research（资讯通信研究院）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
3D object proposals, quickly detected regions in a 3D scene that likely contain an object of interest, are an effective approach to improve the computational efficiency and accuracy of the object detection framework. In this work, we propose a novel online method that uses our previously developed 3D object proposals, in a RGB-D video sequence, to match and track static objects in the scene using shape matching. Our main observation is that depth images provide important information about the geometry of the scene that is often ignored in object matching techniques. Our method takes less than …
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Decentralized deployment of drone swarms usually relies on inter-agent communication or visual markers that are mounted on the vehicles to simplify their mutual detection. This letter proposes a vision-based detection and tracking algorithm that enables groups of drones to navigate without communication or visual markers. We employ a convolutional neural network to detect and localize nearby agents onboard the quadcopters in real-time. Rather than manually labeling a dataset, we automatically annotate images to train the neural network using background subtraction by systematically flying a qu…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
Multi-object tracking is an important ability for an autonomous vehicle to safely navigate a traffic scene. Current state-of-the-art follows the tracking-by-detection paradigm where existing tracks are associated with detected objects through some distance metric. The key challenges to increase tracking accuracy lie in data association and track life cycle management. We propose a probabilistic, multi-modal, multi-object tracking system consisting of different trainable modules to provide robust and data-driven tracking results. First, we learn how to fuse features from 2D images and 3D LiDAR …
TraQuad is an autonomous tracking quadcopter capable of tracking any moving (or static) object like cars, humans, other drones or any other object on-the-go. This article describes the applications and advantages of TraQuad and the reduction in cost (to about 250$) that has been achieved so far using the hardware and software capabilities and our custom algorithms wherever needed. This description is backed by strong data and the research analyses which have been drawn out of extant information or conducted on own when necessary. This also describes the development of completely autonomous (ev…
Unified Single-Stage Transformer Network for Efficient RGB-T Tracking
National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology（国防科技创新研究院）；Tianjin Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center（天津人工智能创新中心）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；ShanDong University（山东大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Beijing Institute of Basic Medical Sciences（北京基础医学研究所）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Multi-Modal UAV Detection, Classification and Tracking Algorithm -- Technical Report for CVPR 2024 UG2 Challenge
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；JITRI（江苏集萃智能制造技术研究所有限公司）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；The Second Academy of China Aerospace Science And Industry Corporation（中国航天科工集团第二研究院）
Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a significant task in achieving autonomous driving. Traditional works attempt to complete this task, either based on point clouds (PC) collected by LiDAR, or based on images captured from cameras. However, relying on one single sensor is not robust enough, because it might fail during the tracking process. On the other hand, feature fusion from multiple modalities contributes to the improvement of accuracy. As a result, new techniques based on different sensors integrating features from multiple modalities are being developed. Texture information from RGB came…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；Scania AB（斯堪尼亚公司）
We present an efficient multi-sensor odometry system for mobile platforms that jointly optimizes visual, lidar, and inertial information within a single integrated factor graph. This runs in real-time at full framerate using fixed lag smoothing. To perform such tight integration, a new method to extract 3D line and planar primitives from lidar point clouds is presented. This approach overcomes the suboptimality of typical frame-to-frame tracking methods by treating the primitives as landmarks and tracking them over multiple scans. True integration of lidar features with standard visual feature…
Institute for Aerospace Studies, University of Toronto（多伦多大学航空航天研究所）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（矢量人工智能研究院）
Accurate indoor localization is a crucial enabling technology for many robotics applications, from warehouse management to monitoring tasks. Ultra-wideband (UWB) time difference of arrival (TDOA)-based localization is a promising lightweight, low-cost solution that can scale to a large number of devices -- making it especially suited for resource-constrained multi-robot applications. However, the localization accuracy of standard, commercially available UWB radios is often insufficient due to significant measurement bias and outliers. In this letter, we address these issues by proposing a robu…
Learning Progressive Adaptation for Multi-Modal Tracking
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（江南大学人工智能与计算机科学学院）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（Surrey大学视觉、语音和信号处理中心）
UASTrack: A Unified Adaptive Selection Framework with Modality-Customization in Single Object Tracking
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（江南大学人工智能与计算机科学学院）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（萨里大学视觉、语音和信号处理中心）
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Multi-modal tracking gains attention due to its ability to be more accurate and robust in complex scenarios compared to traditional RGB-based tracking. Its key lies in how to fuse multi-modal data and reduce the gap between modalities. However, multi-modal tracking still severely suffers from data deficiency, thus resulting in the insufficient learning of fusion modules. Instead of building such a fusion module, in this paper, we provide a new perspective on multi-modal tracking by attaching importance to the multi-modal visual prompts. We design a novel multi-modal prompt tracker (ProTrack), …
In many visual systems, visual tracking often bases on RGB image sequences, in which some targets are invalid in low-light conditions, and tracking performance is thus affected significantly. Introducing other modalities such as depth and infrared data is an effective way to handle imaging limitations of individual sources, but multi-modal imaging platforms usually require elaborate designs and cannot be applied in many real-world applications at present. Near-infrared (NIR) imaging becomes an essential part of many surveillance cameras, whose imaging is switchable between RGB and NIR based on…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Visible-modal object tracking gives rise to a series of downstream multi-modal tracking tributaries. To inherit the powerful representations of the foundation model, a natural modus operandi for multi-modal tracking is full fine-tuning on the RGB-based parameters. Albeit effective, this manner is not optimal due to the scarcity of downstream data and poor transferability, etc. In this paper, inspired by the recent success of the prompt learning in language models, we develop Visual Prompt multi-modal Tracking (ViPT), which learns the modal-relevant prompts to adapt the frozen pre-trained found…
Online 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) has witnessed significant research interest in recent years, largely driven by demand from the autonomous systems community. However, 3D offline MOT is relatively less explored. Labeling 3D trajectory scene data at a large scale while not relying on high-cost human experts is still an open research question. In this work, we propose Batch3DMOT which follows the tracking-by-detection paradigm and represents real-world scenes as directed, acyclic, and category-disjoint tracking graphs that are attributed using various modalities such as camera, LiDAR, and ra…
STNet: Deep Audio-Visual Fusion Network for Robust Speaker Tracking
College of Computer Science and Technology, Taiyuan University of Technology（太原理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Peking University（北京大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）
The task of RGBT tracking aims to take the complementary advantages from visible spectrum and thermal infrared data to achieve robust visual tracking, and receives more and more attention in recent years. Existing works focus on modality-specific information integration by introducing modality weights to achieve adaptive fusion or learning robust feature representations of different modalities. Although these methods could effectively deploy the modality-specific properties, they ignore the potential values of modality-shared cues as well as instance-aware information, which are crucial for ef…
Visual object tracking, as a fundamental task in computer vision, has drawn much attention in recent years. To extend trackers to a wider range of applications, researchers have introduced information from multiple modalities to handle specific scenes, which is a promising research prospect with emerging methods and benchmarks. To provide a thorough review of multi-modal track-ing, we summarize the multi-modal tracking algorithms, especially visible-depth (RGB-D) tracking and visible-thermal (RGB-T) tracking in a unified taxonomy from different aspects. Second, we provide a detailed descriptio…
UBATrack: Spatio-Temporal State Space Model for General Multi-Modal Tracking
Key Laboratory of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University（教育区块链与智能技术重点实验室，教育部，广西师范大学）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multi-Source Information Mining and Security, Guangxi Normal University（广西多源信息挖掘与安全重点实验室，广西师范大学）；University Engineering Research Center of Educational Intelligent Technology, Guangxi Normal University（教育智能技术大学工程研究中心，广西师范大学）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Machine Vision and Intelligent Control, Wuzhou University（广西机器视觉与智能控制重点实验室，梧州大学）
A Tri-Modal Dataset and a Baseline System for Tracking Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（江南大学人工智能与计算机科学学院）；School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering and the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（萨里大学计算机科学与电子工程学院及视觉、语音与信号处理中心）
Key Laboratory of Machine Perception, Peking University, Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院机器感知重点实验室）；Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）
Multi-modal fusion is proven to be an effective method to improve the accuracy and robustness of speaker tracking, especially in complex scenarios. However, how to combine the heterogeneous information and exploit the complementarity of multi-modal signals remains a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-modal Perception Tracker (MPT) for speaker tracking using both audio and visual modalities. Specifically, a novel acoustic map based on spatial-temporal Global Coherence Field (stGCF) is first constructed for heterogeneous signal fusion, which employs a camera model to map …
Classifying the confusing samples in the course of RGBT tracking is a quite challenging problem, which hasn't got satisfied solution. Existing methods only focus on enlarging the boundary between positive and negative samples, however, the structured information of samples might be harmed, e.g., confusing positive samples are closer to the anchor than normal positive samples.To handle this problem, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Multi-Margin Metric Learning framework, named M$^5$L for RGBT tracking in this paper. In particular, we design a multi-margin structured loss to distinguish the confus…
