Elastic Tracker: A Spatio-temporal Trajectory Planner Flexible Aerial Tracking

TL;DR

Elastic Tracker is a novel trajectory planning framework for aerial tracking that ensures safety and visibility through a combination of occlusion-aware path finding, safe corridor generation, and joint optimization, outperforming existing methods in robustness and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comprehensive trajectory planning framework that integrates occlusion-aware path finding, safe corridor generation, and joint optimization for improved aerial tracking.

Findings

More robust tracking performance in challenging scenarios

Reduced computational complexity compared to existing methods

Effective joint optimization of safety and visibility

Abstract

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.