A two-level adaptive target recognition and tracking method based on vision for multi-robot system

The vision-based target recognition and tracking have received much attention in the field of robotics. Existing methods mainly focus on the vision perception of individual robot with a single view, however, the performance is susceptible to illumination and occlusion. Multi-robot collaborative perception provides a potential solution to deal with the limitation of single-view observation, however, the challenging of environmental adaptability for multi-robot collaborative decision still remains unsolved. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a two-level adaptive target recognition and tracking method based on vision for multi-robot system. The problem of multi-robot target recognition and tracking is solved under a two-level framework, which contains the features fusion level of individual robot and the cooperation level of multi-robot system. In the first level, the features measuring results that influence the visual perception of individual robot are fused, while the second level combines the voting of each robot together to determine the target for multi-robot system. Both the features measuring weights and robots voting weights are adaptively updated according to their evaluation, which lead to a beneficial result where the features and robots with higher accuracy play major roles in the first and second levels, respectively. Therefore, a good adaptability to the environments can be guaranteed. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can realize the coordination of multi-robot system in target recognition and tracking with an effective performance.