Safe Tracker: A Robust Aerial System for Safe Tracking in Cluttered Environments

This paper proposes Safe Tracker, an autonomous aerial tracking framework based on vision sensor that can deal with challenging tracking missions and guarantee safety and visibility. Firstly, a RGB-D sensor based segmentation method is employed to locate the target in real-time. Then target motion is predicted for a short time horizon, based on which a heuristic path searching method is applied to generate an occlusion-free path. Finally, particular formulations to balance visibility and safety are designed, and an effective non-linear trajectory optimization method enables to generate an optimal tracking trajectory. Autonomous aerial tracking experiments using a vision sensor are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Safe Tracker in a challenging cluttered forest and a room full of sharp turns using Gazebo. Benchmark comparisons validate that our method tracks more safely and robustly than the state-of-art method.