Tracked vehicles distribute their weight continuously over a large surface area (the tracks). This distinctive feature makes them the preferred choice for vehicles required to traverse soft and uneven terrain. From a robotics perspective, however, this flexibility comes at a cost: the complexity of modelling the system and the resulting difficulty in designing theoretically sound navigation solutions. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by proposing a framework for the navigation of tracked vehicles, built upon three key pillars. The first pillar comprises two models: a simulation model and a control-oriented model. The simulation model captures the intricate terramechanics dynamics arising from soil-track interaction and is employed to develop faithful digital twins of the system across a wide range of operating conditions. The control-oriented model is pseudo-kinematic and mathematically tractable, enabling the design of efficient and theoretically robust control schemes. The second pillar is a Lyapunov-based feedback trajectory controller that provides certifiable tracking guarantees. The third pillar is a portfolio of motion planning solutions, each offering different comp
AutoTAB is a state-of-the-art, fully automatic algorithm that tracks the Bipolar Magnetic Regions (BMRs) in magnetogram observations. AutoTAB employs identified BMR regions from Line-of-Sight magnetograms from MDI and HMI (1996--2022) to track the BMRs through their evolution on the nearside of the Sun. AutoTAB enables us to create a comprehensive and unique catalog of tracked information of 9232 BMRs in the mentioned time period. This dataset is used to study the collective statistical properties of BMRs and particularly to identify the correct theory for the BMR formation. Here, we discuss the algorithm's functionality and the initial findings obtained from the AutoTAB BMRs catalog.
In this paper, an uncertain norm-bounded mathematical model for a remotely controlled skid-slip tracked mobile robot. The linear state space description aims to describe the nonlinear error dynamics of the robot during the trajectory tracking maneuver in the presence of a delay in the control channel, taking into account unknown but bounded slip coefficients.
The hybrid electric system has good potential for unmanned tracked vehicles due to its excellent power and economy. Due to unmanned tracked vehicles have no traditional driving devices, and the driving cycle is uncertain, it brings new challenges to conventional energy management strategies. This paper proposes a novel energy management strategy for unmanned tracked vehicles based on local speed planning. The contributions are threefold. Firstly, a local speed planning algorithm is adopted for the input of driving cycle prediction to avoid the dependence of traditional vehicles on driver's operation. Secondly, a prediction model based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) is proposed, which is used to process both the planned and the historical velocity series to improve the prediction accuracy. Finally, based on the prediction results, the model predictive control algorithm is used to realize the real-time optimization of energy management. The validity of the method is verified by simulation using collected data from actual field experiments of our unmanned tracked vehicle. Compared with multi-step neural networks, the prediction model based on CN
This paper develops a new quasi-static modeling framework for tracked robots based on the power dissipation method. Given a set of track speeds, this method predicts the vehicle's instantaneous rigid body motion. We introduce three specific models: a model for tracked operation on flat ground, a model for vehicle motion when the track's grouser tips touch the ground, and a model for operation on stairs. Experiments show that these models predict tracked vehicle motion more accurately than existing kinematic models, and predict phenomena which are not captured by other models. These novel models provide a basis for new feedback control approaches.
We investigate the typical sizes and shapes of sets of points obtained by irregularly tracking two-dimensional Brownian bridges. The tracking process consists of observing the path location at the arrival times of a non-homogeneous Poisson process on a finite time interval. The time varying intensity of this observation process is the tracking strategy. By analysing the gyration tensor of tracked points we prove two theorems which relate the tracking strategy to the average gyration radius, and to the asphericity -- a measure of how non-spherical the point set is. The act of tracking may be interpreted either as a process of observation, or as process of depositing time decaying "evidence" such as scent, environmental disturbance, or disease particles. We present examples of different strategies, and explore by simulation the effects of varying the total number of tracking points.
The CenterTrack tracking algorithm achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance using a simple detection model and single-frame spatial offsets to localize objects and predict their associations in a single network. However, this joint detection and tracking method still suffers from high identity switches due to the inferior association method. To reduce the high number of identity switches and improve the tracking accuracy, in this paper, we propose to incorporate a simple tracked object bounding box and overlapping prediction based on the current frame onto the CenterTrack algorithm. Specifically, we propose an Intersection over Union (IOU) distance cost matrix in the association step instead of simple point displacement distance. We evaluate our proposed tracker on the MOT17 test dataset, showing that our proposed method can reduce identity switches significantly by 22.6% and obtain a notable improvement of 1.5% in IDF1 compared to the original CenterTrack's under the same tracklet lifetime. The source code is released at https://github.com/Nanyangny/CenterTrack-IOU.
The issue of seamless identification of users previously tracked using existing real-time optical position tracking system such as the OptiTrack system and maintaining continuous tracking state (history) of each of those users is a hard problem. In this article, we present a theoretical framework to integrate existing tracking systems with features such as user identification and history of up to `n' person activity. In our approach, we assume no direct communication with the tracking system, but access to all data it collects. Also, there are no guarantees that 1) the order of each tracked retro-reflective sphere reported is the same, and 2) that there will be any particular number of spheres in the room at any given time. We describe how the data is fused with existing tracking data to provide a seamless transition between other forms of position tracking.
In this work we propose tracking as a generic addition to the instance search task. From video data perspective, much information that can be used is not taken into account in the traditional instance search approach. This work aims to provide insights on exploiting such existing information by means of tracking and the proper combination of the results, independently of the instance search system. We also present a study on the improvement of the system when using multiple independent instances (up to 4) of the same person. Experimental results show that our system improves substantially its performance when using tracking. Best configuration improves from mAP = 0.447 to mAP = 0.511 for a single example, and from mAP = 0.647 to mAP = 0.704 for multiple (4) given examples.
Prestigious news publishers, and more recently, Meta, have begun to request that users pay for privacy. Specifically, users receive a notification banner, referred to as a pay-or-tracking wall, that requires them to (i) pay money to avoid being tracked or (ii) consent to being tracked. These walls have invited concerns that privacy might become a luxury. However, little is known about pay-or-tracking walls, which prevents a meaningful discussion about their appropriateness. This paper conducts several empirical studies and finds that top EU publishers use pay-or-tracking walls. Their implementations involve various approaches, including bundling the pay option with advertising-free access or additional content. The price for not being tracked exceeds the advertising revenue that publishers generate from a user who consents to being tracked. Notably, publishers' traffic does not decline when implementing a pay-or-tracking wall and most users consent to being tracked; only a few users pay. In short, pay-or-tracking walls seem to provide the means for expanding the practice of tracking. Publishers profit from pay-or-tracking walls and may observe a revenue increase of 16.4% due to tra
We propose a novel algorithm for accelerating dense long-term 3D point tracking in videos. Through analysis of existing state-of-the-art methods, we identify two major computational bottlenecks. First, transformer-based iterative tracking becomes expensive when handling a large number of trajectories. To address this, we introduce a coarse-to-fine strategy that begins tracking with a small subset of points and progressively expands the set of tracked trajectories. The newly added trajectories are initialized using a learnable interpolation module, which is trained end-to-end alongside the tracking network. Second, we propose an optimization that significantly reduces the cost of correlation feature computation, another key bottleneck in prior methods. Together, these improvements lead to a 5-100x speedup over existing approaches while maintaining state-of-the-art tracking accuracy.
Multi-camera tracking plays a pivotal role in various real-world applications. While end-to-end methods have gained significant interest in single-camera tracking, multi-camera tracking remains predominantly reliant on heuristic techniques. In response to this gap, this paper introduces Multi-Camera Tracking tRansformer (MCTR), a novel end-to-end approach tailored for multi-object detection and tracking across multiple cameras with overlapping fields of view. MCTR leverages end-to-end detectors like DEtector TRansformer (DETR) to produce detections and detection embeddings independently for each camera view. The framework maintains set of track embeddings that encaplusate global information about the tracked objects, and updates them at every frame by integrating the local information from the view-specific detection embeddings. The track embeddings are probabilistically associated with detections in every camera view and frame to generate consistent object tracks. The soft probabilistic association facilitates the design of differentiable losses that enable end-to-end training of the entire system. To validate our approach, we conduct experiments on MMPTrack and AI City Challenge,
State of the art methods for target tracking with sensor management (or controlled sensing) are model-based and are obtained through solutions to Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) formulations. In this paper a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to the problem is explored for the setting where the motion model for the object/target to be tracked is unknown to the observer. It is assumed that the target dynamics are stationary in time, the state space and the observation space are discrete, and there is complete observability of the location of the target under certain (a priori unknown) sensor control actions. Then, a novel Markov Decision Process (MDP) rather than POMDP formulation is proposed for the tracking problem with controlled sensing, which is termed as Track-MDP. In contrast to the POMDP formulation, the Track-MDP formulation is amenable to an RL based solution. It is shown that the optimal policy for the Track-MDP formulation, which is approximated through RL, is guaranteed to track all significant target paths with certainty. The Track-MDP method is then compared with the optimal POMDP policy, and it is shown that the infinite horizon tracking reward
The main objective of tracking control is to steer the tracking error, that is the difference between the reference and the output, to zero while the plant's operation limits are satisfied. This requires that some assumptions on the evolution of the future values of the reference must be taken into account. Typically a simple evolution of the reference is considered, such as step, ramp, or parabolic reference signals. It is important to notice that the tracking problem considers possible variations in the reference to be tracked, such as steps or slope variations of the ramps. Then the tracking control problem is inherently uncertain, since the reference may differ from what is expected. If the value of the reference is changed, then there is no guarantee that the feasibility and stability properties of the resulting control law hold. This report presents the MPC for tracking (MPCT) approach, which ensures recursive feasibility and asymptotic stability of the setpoint when the value of the reference is changed.
Visual object tracking is a fundamental video task in computer vision. Recently, the notably increasing power of perception algorithms allows the unification of single/multiobject and box/mask-based tracking. Among them, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) attracts much attention. In this report, we propose HQTrack, a framework for High Quality Tracking anything in videos. HQTrack mainly consists of a video multi-object segmenter (VMOS) and a mask refiner (MR). Given the object to be tracked in the initial frame of a video, VMOS propagates the object masks to the current frame. The mask results at this stage are not accurate enough since VMOS is trained on several closeset video object segmentation (VOS) datasets, which has limited ability to generalize to complex and corner scenes. To further improve the quality of tracking masks, a pretrained MR model is employed to refine the tracking results. As a compelling testament to the effectiveness of our paradigm, without employing any tricks such as test-time data augmentations and model ensemble, HQTrack ranks the 2nd place in the Visual Object Tracking and Segmentation (VOTS2023) challenge. Code and models are available at https://githu
In this paper, we present an algorithm which lies in the domain of task allocation for a set of static autonomous radars with rotating antennas. It allows a set of radars to allocate in a fully decentralized way a set of active tracking tasks according to their location, considering that a target can be tracked by several radars, in order to improve accuracy with which the target is tracked. The allocation algorithm proceeds through a collaborative and fully decentralized auction protocol, using a collaborative auction protocol (Consensus Based Bundle Auction algorithm). Our algorithm is based on a double use of our allocation protocol among the radars. The latter begin by allocating targets, then launch a second round of allocation if theyhave resources left, in order to improve accuracy on targets already tracked. Our algorithm is also able to adapt to dynamism, i.e. to take into account the fact that the targets are moving and that the radar(s) most suitable for Tracking them changes as the mission progresses. To do this, the algorithm is restarted on a regular basis, to ensure that a bid made by a radar can decrease when the target moves away from it. Since our algorithm is bas
Multi-ship tracking (MST) as a core technology has been proven to be applied to situational awareness at sea and the development of a navigational system for autonomous ships. Despite impressive tracking outcomes achieved by multi-object tracking (MOT) algorithms for pedestrian and vehicle datasets, these models and techniques exhibit poor performance when applied to ship datasets. Intersection of Union (IoU) is the most popular metric for computing similarity used in object tracking. The low frame rates and severe image shake caused by wave turbulence in ship datasets often result in minimal, or even zero, Intersection of Union (IoU) between the predicted and detected bounding boxes. This issue contributes to frequent identity switches of tracked objects, undermining the tracking performance. In this paper, we address the weaknesses of IoU by incorporating the smallest convex shapes that enclose both the predicted and detected bounding boxes. The calculation of the tracking version of IoU (TIoU) metric considers not only the size of the overlapping area between the detection bounding box and the prediction box, but also the similarity of their shapes. Through the integration of th
Multi-Person Tracking (MPT) is often addressed within the detection-to-association paradigm. In such approaches, human detections are first extracted in every frame and person trajectories are then recovered by a procedure of data association (usually offline). However, their performances usually degenerate in presence of detection errors, mutual interactions and occlusions. In this paper, we present a deep learning based MPT approach that learns instance-aware representations of tracked persons and robustly online infers states of the tracked persons. Specifically, we design a multi-branch neural network (MBN), which predicts the classification confidences and locations of all targets by taking a batch of candidate regions as input. In our MBN architecture, each branch (instance-subnet) corresponds to an individual to be tracked and new branches can be dynamically created for handling newly appearing persons. Then based on the output of MBN, we construct a joint association matrix that represents meaningful states of tracked persons (e.g., being tracked or disappearing from the scene) and solve it by using the efficient Hungarian algorithm. Moreover, we allow the instance-subnets
We propose an online tracking algorithm that performs the object detection and data association under a common framework, capable of linking objects after a long time span. This is realized by preserving a large spatio-temporal memory to store the identity embeddings of the tracked objects, and by adaptively referencing and aggregating useful information from the memory as needed. Our model, called MeMOT, consists of three main modules that are all Transformer-based: 1) Hypothesis Generation that produce object proposals in the current video frame; 2) Memory Encoding that extracts the core information from the memory for each tracked object; and 3) Memory Decoding that solves the object detection and data association tasks simultaneously for multi-object tracking. When evaluated on widely adopted MOT benchmark datasets, MeMOT observes very competitive performance.