Elastic Tracker: A Spatio-temporal Trajectory Planner Flexible Aerial Tracking
This addresses the challenge of flexible and safe aerial tracking for drones or robots, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing planning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of aerial tracking by proposing Elastic Tracker, a trajectory planning framework that ensures safety and visibility, resulting in more robust performance with less computation than existing methods.
This paper proposes Elastic Tracker, a flexible trajectory planning framework that can deal with challenging tracking tasks with guaranteed safety and visibility. Firstly, an object detection and intension-free motion prediction method is designed. Then an occlusion-aware path finding method is proposed to provide a proper topology. A smart safe flight corridor generation strategy is designed with the guiding path. An analytical occlusion cost is evaluated. Finally, an effective trajectory optimization approach enables to generate a spatio-temporal optimal trajectory within the resultant flight corridor. Particular formulations are designed to guarantee both safety and visibility, with all the above requirements optimized jointly. The experimental results show that our method works more robustly but with less computation than the existing methods, even in some challenging tracking tasks.