Near Real-Time Position Tracking for Robot-Guided Evacuation

TL;DR

This paper presents a near real-time human position tracking system for evacuation robots, achieving 0.55-meter accuracy at 3 FPS, enabling effective robot-guided evacuation and potential motion prediction.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel near real-time human tracking method using pose detection and simple calibration, tailored for evacuation robots in indoor environments.

Findings

Achieves 0.55 meters accuracy in indoor lab tests.

Operates at an average of 3 frames per second.

Supports potential for evacuee motion prediction.

Abstract

During the evacuation of a building, the rapid and accurate tracking of human evacuees can be used by a guide robot to increase the effectiveness of the evacuation [1],[2]. This paper introduces a near real-time human position tracking solution tailored for evacuation robots. Using a pose detector, our system first identifies human joints in the camera frame in near real-time and then translates the position of these pixels into real-world coordinates via a simple calibration process. We run multiple trials of the system in action in an indoor lab environment and show that the system can achieve an accuracy of 0.55 meters when compared to ground truth. The system can also achieve an average of 3 frames per second (FPS) which was sufficient for our study on robot-guided human evacuation. The potential of our approach extends beyond mere tracking, paving the way for evacuee motion prediction, allowing the robot to proactively respond to human movements during an evacuation.