Tracking Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on SE(3) Using a Monocular Camera
Mark E. Petersen, Jaron Ellingson, Randal W. Beard · IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems · 2022
This article presents MTT-$\text{SE}\mathopen {}(3)\mathclose {}$, a vision-based multiple-target tracking algorithm for targets that evolve on the special Euclidean group$\text{SE}\mathopen {}(3)\mathclose {}$in dense clutter. The target state consists of the pose in$\text{SE}\mathopen {}(3)\mathclose {}$and the twist of the vehicle. Contributions of the article include the development of a robust track initialization scheme designed on$\text{SE}\mathopen {}(3)\mathclose {}\times \mathbb {R}^{6}$, and a track-to-track association and fusion algorithm to merge similar tracks evolving on$\text{SE}\mathopen {}(3)\mathclose {}\times \mathbb {R}^{6}$. The performance of MTT-$\text{SE}\mathopen {}(3)\mathclose {}$is verified in hardware by simultaneously tracking three multirotors using a stationary monocular camera. The results are compared to a multiple-target tracking algorithm that uses linear, time-invariant nearly constant velocity, acceleration, and jerk models, where it is shown that MTT-$\text{SE}\mathopen {}(3)\mathclose {}$improves several traditional tracking metrics.