D-VAT: End-to-End Visual Active Tracking for Micro Aerial Vehicles

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dionigi, Alberto, Felicioni, Simone, Leomanni, Mirko, Costante, Gabriele
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Dionigi, Alberto
Felicioni, Simone
Leomanni, Mirko
Costante, Gabriele
author_facet Dionigi, Alberto
Felicioni, Simone
Leomanni, Mirko
Costante, Gabriele
contents Visual active tracking is a growing research topic in robotics due to its key role in applications such as human assistance, disaster recovery, and surveillance. In contrast to passive tracking, active tracking approaches combine vision and control capabilities to detect and actively track the target. Most of the work in this area focuses on ground robots, while the very few contributions on aerial platforms still pose important design constraints that limit their applicability. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we propose D-VAT, a novel end-to-end visual active tracking methodology based on deep reinforcement learning that is tailored to micro aerial vehicle platforms. The D-VAT agent computes the vehicle thrust and angular velocity commands needed to track the target by directly processing monocular camera measurements. We show that the proposed approach allows for precise and collision-free tracking operations, outperforming different state-of-the-art baselines on simulated environments which differ significantly from those encountered during training. Moreover, we demonstrate a smooth real-world transition to a quadrotor platform with mixed-reality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_16874
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle D-VAT: End-to-End Visual Active Tracking for Micro Aerial Vehicles
Dionigi, Alberto
Felicioni, Simone
Leomanni, Mirko
Costante, Gabriele
Robotics
Visual active tracking is a growing research topic in robotics due to its key role in applications such as human assistance, disaster recovery, and surveillance. In contrast to passive tracking, active tracking approaches combine vision and control capabilities to detect and actively track the target. Most of the work in this area focuses on ground robots, while the very few contributions on aerial platforms still pose important design constraints that limit their applicability. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we propose D-VAT, a novel end-to-end visual active tracking methodology based on deep reinforcement learning that is tailored to micro aerial vehicle platforms. The D-VAT agent computes the vehicle thrust and angular velocity commands needed to track the target by directly processing monocular camera measurements. We show that the proposed approach allows for precise and collision-free tracking operations, outperforming different state-of-the-art baselines on simulated environments which differ significantly from those encountered during training. Moreover, we demonstrate a smooth real-world transition to a quadrotor platform with mixed-reality.
title D-VAT: End-to-End Visual Active Tracking for Micro Aerial Vehicles
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16874